


Disassemble

by ancientroots



Category: Hyouka & Kotenbu Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 10:36:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5582419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientroots/pseuds/ancientroots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Because he didn’t know. Because over the past three years, the two of them had been slowly, surely, disassembling their friendship, all the mechanisms they’d built to keep it functioning, keep it together. They only had the pieces left.'</p><p>Three years after Jiro tried and failed to convince Muneyoshi to draw 'Kudryavka's Order', the two of them meet once again at a high school reunion. Jiro is a struggling mangaka who has just hit his first break, and Muneyoshi is hiding from the mess that has become his life. When Jiro suggests a friendly competition, they discover that the past isn't anymore a sanctuary than the present.</p><p>In their first year of university, Hotaro gets up the courage to ask Satoshi out. Satoshi doesn't seem to think this will have the rose-coloured ending Hotaro was most definitely not hoping for. The challenge Satoshi throws down, Satoshi who never thinks he can win: it isn't what it seems.</p><p>Old friendships come with old problems, and no matter how they like to think they've grown up and grown past, there comes a time when you have to ask yourself: are some things meant to be fixed?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They said goodbye to each other in Tokyo. The boxes had been taken apart and stacked in the closet with his futon, his clothes, and his luggage bag. His manga and tools laid out neatly on the shelves, the desk, in the drawers. Mune’s housewarming gift of a cake sliced into, eaten, and the remains placed in a plastic container and stored in the tiny fridge. Mune ran out and bought it when Jiro was ordering pizza. They had both known where he’d gone. It didn’t make the cake taste any worse, or the feeling in Jiro’s chest any less warm.  
  
At ten o’clock at night, they stood on opposite sides of Jiro’s new front door and looked at each other. It was a cold spring that year, and Mune was dressed warmly, nose and mouth tucked into the folds of his favourite green scarf, skull cap pulled tight over his ears and hiding the messy waves of his hair.  
  
The apartment was empty behind Jiro, too quiet in this quiet, alien city. He had the sudden urge to ask his friend to stay.  
  
But Mune, who was stronger about these things, spoke first. “Thanks for helping me out earlier.”  
  
“Thanks for helping me out too.”  
  
His friend laughed. “Listen to us. We sound so formal.” And then with comic sobriety, he bowed to Jiro. When his head came back up, he winked. “Please come visit me. Often. I’d be very happy to have you over at my poky student dorm just thirteen minutes away by subway.”  
  
Jiro shoved him. “I’ll visit you,” he promised. “I’ll steal all your food and take your bed in the winter so I can save on heating expenses.”  
  
Mune hopped back, clutching his head. “Ow! I’m going to need my brain this year, you know.”  
  
They smiled at each other. There was nothing else to say. No other reason to delay. His best friend for the past three years gave him a little wave. “See you around, Sho.”  
  
“See you,” he echoed.  
  
He closed the door. Stood with his back to it, and listened to the clank of Mune’s shoes on the aluminium lattice of the external staircase. It was his first night in Tokyo, all on his own. He could be a little sentimental.  
  
When the sounds faded, he slid open the closet door, dragged his futon out. Pulled the covers over his head, put on his earphones, opened his laptop, and looked up the loudest battle anime he could think of. There would be time enough to finish his manuscript the next day. For that night, he let the tinny explosions block out the silence, and lull him to sleep.  
  
Jiro would come to see this as a metaphor.  
  
How the tinny explosions of his new, exciting, jam-packed Tokyo life crowded out everything else, made it all less important. So that three years later, when for the first time he could afford to breathe again, to wake from his dream, he found himself looking across a turntable, a couple of Chinese dishes at a cheap restaurant in Shinjuku, and old classmates he hadn’t seen since graduation, at a ghost.    
  
“Hey, Sho,” said Mune. Jiro hadn’t heard that nickname for a long time. There was tired edge to his smile. “It’s been a while.”  
  
Sawakiguchi, who now wore her hair in a far more respectable bob, slapped her hands on the table and swung her head from one of them to the other, and back again. “A while?” she repeated. “You mean you two aren’t joined at the hip anymore?”  
  
A pale, elegant hand drew her back into her seat by the back of her blouse. Irisu was another person who’d changed. In her crisp white work shirt and pencil skirt, her lips dusted rose and the barest hint of mascara bringing out the blue of her eyes, she looked like she was at least four years older than the rest of them. Jiro had heard Irisu was taking on responsibilities as her father’s representative in Tokyo. The rumours must be true.  
  
Two-year old rumours, he thought, with a certain dryness. How long had it been since he tapped into the Kamiyama grapevine, much less interacted with anyone in it? But he had been so busy.  
  
“Please be quieter, Sawakiguchi-san,” Irie was saying. “We’ll disturb the other customers.”  
  
“But it’s a reunion! A high school reunion. We’re meant to be loud. And rowdy. And there’s supposed to be drinking. And…”  
  
Mune followed this conversation from his end of the table, his chin propped up on his palm. He looked no different, Jiro thought. The same tousled brown hair, the same warm eyes, the same tanned skin, the same boyish lines to his face. Perhaps that was why he’d felt like he had seen a ghost. Mune looked exactly like the boy that had stood on his doorstep three years ago, and said goodbye.  
  
That boy’s gaze slid back to him. Its owner smiled again. The cheerful, friendly smile that Jiro’d seen Mune give to every student he ever came across at Kamiyama. His inner reaction to this must have showed on his face, because the smile regained some of Jiro’s remembered softness. And at the end of the reunion, as everyone was leaving, Mune touched his shoulder.  
  
“You want to walk back together? We can catch up.”  
  
It was a cold autumn. Cold enough that at work Matsumoto-san was making noises about how it might snow this winter and how she needed to get a new kotatsu to replace the broken one. Jiro didn’t understand why she couldn’t come right out and ask him to fix the heating source for her. Regardless, he was happy to help.  
  
“What are you smiling about?” Mune asked him. His voice was muffled, his mouth and nose tucked into the folds of his favourite green scarf.  
  
They were standing on the subway platform. Under the stark lights, it occurred to Jiro that his friend looked tired. There were shadows under his eyes, a tightness between his eyebrows, like at some point Mune had gotten used to frowning. Not so unchanged after all.  
  
If Jiro told him about Matsumoto-san, Mune would find it funny. Perhaps he would look less tired, even start goofing off, making up and acting out scenarios of how exactly Matsumoto-san would have gone about asking Jiro for help directly.  
  
But he would have to explain who Matsumoto-san was. How he knew her. Why he was working in a supermarket now. What had happened with his old job. It seemed like a long story. Too long just to get a laugh out of someone. By the time he reached the punchline, they would have both forgotten the joke.  
  
He said, “I wasn’t.”  
  
Mune nudged him. “Liar. Was it a girlfriend? Was that it?”  
  
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”  
  
“Really? What have you been doing with your life?”  
  
They could hear the whoosh of the oncoming train. The lights in the train were kinder. Brighter, yellower, flooding the carriages so that there were fewer shadows left than on the platform, fewer sharp contrasts. They got on at the same time. As the doors shut, Jiro said, “I’ll tell you if you tell me.”  
  
It was easier after that. As if they’d set the agenda for their reunion, and now they both knew how to proceed.  
  
At Jiro’s apartment, Mune took off his shoes, murmured ‘excuse me’ to the five-mat room, and sat down at the low table with his legs stretched out under it as Jiro put tea on to boil. When he returned with a tray, a teapot and two steaming cups, he kicked Mune’s leg with a socked foot. “Sit properly.”  
  
Mune stuck his tongue out. “Hai.”  
  
Folding his legs under him, Jiro handed one cup to his friend and took one himself. The ever-present breeze of cars over the nearby highway was loud in the silence. He had become so used to it. Was it just Mune’s presence that reminded him what real quiet sounded like?  
  
“Okay,” said Mune decisively. “Where should I start?” A tip of the head, and a dubious look at the ceiling. “When was the last time we met?”  
  
He sipped his tea. He hadn’t left it for long enough, so it tasted more like water than anything else. After a moment, he recalled, “My birthday. You brought the cake.”  
  
“Right! Okay, after that I decided to join the Western archery club.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Yeah, right? It was just a whim. It looked cool and…”  
  
Jiro had chosen that moment, that spring day as the day they said goodbye. It was the kind of opening he would have drawn into a manga. Simple, curious. The promise of something sad, the kind of sad like dark chocolate that was too bitter, black coffee when you were used to sugar and cream, a voice you couldn’t quite recall, but which lingered. Why did it linger?  
  
But the truth was they saw each other after. He did visit Mune at his dorms as he’d promised he would, and Mune visited a few times, notably on his birthday with a cake in tow. They texted, called, ‘liked’ and commented on each other’s Facebook posts. It was the electronic age. It shouldn’t have been easy to lose touch.  
  
As a mangaka’s assistant, Jiro spent ten to fifteen hours every day frantically buying coffee and takeaway, scraping and cutting screentones, drawing backgrounds and falling asleep on the train home. He woke up before the sun did and slept when he couldn’t open his eyes, using up the rest of his time to draw his own manuscripts.  
  
After a while, he could barely focus his attention long enough to understand why he’d drawn this background character wrong and was once again holding everyone back, or why the editor at Jump was once again rejecting his submission. Two years in, during the week-long holiday he got at New Year’s, he lay on his futon, staring up at his ceiling, and realised he didn’t remember quite what his own hand looked like. Much less his apartment. Much less Facebook. So he quit.  
  
It was hard to get a job, seeing as he was in a student-infested part of Tokyo. But he was looking for a full-time job, and he had years of part-time experience from his high school years, so a small café-cum-convenience store that he could walk to in the mornings accepted his application. He had more time then, working one or two shifts a day. But by then, it had become normal not to use his phone for anything but work purposes, and Facebook was something of a distant memory. He remembered surfing it once before, catching up on what his classmates were doing. Maybe Mune had posted something. He could no longer remember what it was.  
  
“And then,” Mune said. “We come to third year.” At some point, they had finished the tea. Two cups each, the second greener and thicker like it was supposed to be. At som point, Jiro had gotten up and gotten them a bowl of grapes and when that was gone, a box of Pocky.  
  
Mune twirled his Pocky stick in his fingers. There was a darkness in his face, a shadow. And then he looked up, and Jiro thought he must have imagined it. “Well, we haven’t finished third year, right? Still one and a half semesters to go.”  
  
His friend crossed his legs, leaned his elbows on the table and beamed up at him. “Your turn. You were telling me how you didn’t have a girlfriend. How could you, Jiro. I had two.”  
  
The single-minded focus was jarring. How long had it been since he talked about himself like this to anyone? He felt a stab of tension. What was he supposed to say? It had been almost three years. But Mune was watching him, a smile still quirking his lips. And hadn’t he been given a cue?  
  
He bit into his own Pocky state, a bite of chocolate courage, and then said, “First of all, Mune, that’s abnormal. Most kids our age wish they had a girlfriend. They don’t actually have one, much less two. Second, when I was still working as an assistant…”  
  
In the end, he said a lot.  
  
He almost always did, with Mune.  
  
Except for that one most important thing, which he just couldn’t say. Which Mune just hadn’t be able to understand.  
  
It was two o’clock in the morning, when he finally got to today. The reason why, when Irisu texted him as a last resort, seeing as he’d never replied to her Facebook messages or e-mails, to tell him that someone else had cancelled and they needed to fill up the booked spaces, he’d said yes. The reason why he’d been so out of himself that when he saw Mune across the table, he had thought he was looking at a ghost.  
  
“I did it,” he said. “The Tezuka Prize. I got second place. They told me today. And Yujiro-san called and said that it’s good enough they might serialise it.”  
  
Eleven times. He’d tried eleven times since he entered high school. Mune’s face was opening, his mouth into a grin, his eyes brightening, even his hair seemed to be lifting, although Jiro was certain that was his exhaustion talking.  
  
What was it about sharing an accomplishment with someone else, someone important, that made it seem real for the first time?  
  
He realised he was grinning too.  
  
“Congratulations, Sho,” Mune said. “Really, congratulations. You’ve worked so hard. I’ll buy it, okay? The latest issue. And when you get serialised, you’ll have to sign my copies for me so that I can sell them and…”  
  
“Okay,” he laughed. “Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mune. It’s bad luck.”  
  
And then there were hands on his face. The fingers, cool. When Mune had been in his first year of high school, he grew so rapidly and became so gangly for the one summer, they’d joked that his blood wouldn’t reach into his fingers and toes, and they would become like girls’ hair sometimes did, like dried up plants in a desert.  
  
Then in their second year, when every other boy was still in that painful growing phase, Mune settled into his new body and became…himself. As a Kamiyama High graduate of 2003, Jiro didn’t think it’d been very original of him, to have had his sexual awakening courtesy of Kugayama Muneyoshi.  
  
Mune’s mouth was hot, hotter than he’d imagined. When Jiro touched his hair, slipping his fingers through the strands, it was softer than he’d dreamed. Mune’s hands came down from his face, fisted in his shirt. It must have been uncomfortable, on his knees and leaning across the table like that, and Jiro found his own hands going instinctively to Mune’s hips, supporting him.  
  
He could feel warm skin through the fabric. His best friend made a sound, a sound that Jiro could swallow into his own mouth. Suddenly, he felt the need to stick his tongue past Mune’s lips, lean further into the kiss, force that sound again.  
  
He was twenty-one years old. This wasn’t his first kiss. He shouldn’t have been getting hard in his pants.  
  
They broke apart, out of breath. Mune’s eyes were unfocused, his mouth open, wet and red. Then he seemed to come back into himself, focus properly on Jiro, and his face went slack, pale.  
  
Jiro grabbed his wrist. “Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”  
  
Mune covered his eyes with his other hand. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”  
  
“Why?” he asked, evenly. But he could feel his skin flushing. “I liked it.”  
  
His friend stared at him, and then smiled. The friendly, cheerful, but soft, soft smile he always reserved just for his family, for Jiro. He freed his wrist from Jiro’s grasp, threw his arms around Jiro’s neck and hugged him. “Thank you.” His voice was muffled by the wall of Jiro’s own head. “I’m sorry.”  
  
Jiro didn’t know what to do about the strange, dark note in Mune’s voice. He touched his friend’s elbow. Opened his mouth.  
  
But Mune pulled back then. Asked, “Can I stay over? It’s just that it’s almost three.”  
  
He jolted. Glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Shit.”  
  
“Did you swear, Sho?”  
  
“Matsumoto-san,” he said defensively. “And Yujiro-san and his boyfriend. You try not learning how to swear around them.”  
  
Mune grinned. Jiro wished he wasn’t thinking about how to kiss the curve off those lips. “I do know how to swear, Sho. I just don’t.”  
  
He threw the box of Pocky at his best friend. “I’ll get the spare futon.”  
  
“Do you have a spare toothbrush?”  
  
“Sure. Check behind the mirror. Won’t it be uncomfortable sleeping in your jeans?”  
  
“Nah. I’m used to it.”  
  
Jiro decided that he wasn't going to to pick apart that sentence. If Mune was having spontaneous sleepovers with someone and it was important, he would tell him so.  
  
Sliding open the closet door, he pulled out first his futon and then the spare. “You can use the bathroom first.”  
  
“You don’t need help?”  
  
“Come on, Mune. It’s three. Go. I have a shift tomorrow, and you’ll get in the way.”  
  
The bathroom door opened, shut. He dragged both futons out onto the floor. When he heard the tap turn on to full blast, he stopped. Exhaled once, slowly.  
  
Not so unchanged, after all. Either of them.  
  
  
  
Hotaro didn’t know why he said it. It was one of those rose-coloured scenarios, except neither of them were in high school and when he turned his head from the glittering lights of Tokyo over the black body of water, he looked into a familiar, rather than ethereally beautiful face.  
  
“Satoshi,” he said. “I like you.”  
  
He didn’t know what response he’d been expecting either. Maybe he’d predicted it, maybe he hadn’t. Satoshi lowering his forehead to the cool metal of the railing. Satoshi laughing. “Hotaro,” he said. “Let’s be clear. You like me, as in you’re in love with me, and not you like me, as in we’re friends.”  
  
He didn’t answer. It was obvious. Why would he have said it otherwise?  
  
Satoshi raised his head. In the glow of the street lamps on their side, the glitter of the multi-coloured city lights on the other, it was possible to make out the colour of his eyes. The evil irritation in the crease between his eyebrows, the baring of his teeth.  
  
His best friend said, “Sorry. But I don’t believe you.”  
  
Hotaro could be embarassed too. He jerked his face away, towards the water. “Why?”  
  
“The circumstances aren’t right.”  
  
“What circumstances?”  
  
Satoshi told him. 


	2. Chapter 2

“As a database,” Satoshi said. “I can’t draw conclusions. So what I’ll do is lay out the facts for you and then the rest is up to you, Hotaro.”

This was wrong. It was all wrong. But Satoshi couldn’t prove that it was, justify this anger inside him that was too dark, too close to real rage, so he put his pet theory, all his evidence before Hotaro and if Hotaro saw beyond the biased arrangement to something more, the truth, then he would admit defeat.

What he would do after, he didn’t know.

He braced an elbow on the railing, the other arm dangling beside it, and counted off on his fingers. “First and most important is the place.”

Hotaro stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders. He didn’t look up. His tone was sulky. “What’s wrong with the place?”

“The water. The bridge. The lights. It’s a rose-coloured scenario, isn’t it?” He glanced at the top of his best friend’s head, then back at his own raised hand. “That’s not like you at all. Then there’s the timing.”

Silence.

He continued. “Three a.m. on a normal night after a normal dinner for two at our normal ramen place. Normal romantic. Romantic normal.”

“If that’s the case,” said Hotaro. “Then all timings would be wrong.”

“Okay,” he admitted. “Dismissed. But then there’s the other timing problem. This is more chronological in nature.” And then he pushed his face close to Hotaro’s, right into his personal space. Hotaro reared back, his eyes widening, then narrowing and shifting back to the water lapping at the concrete legs of the jetty beneath their feet. 

Satoshi said, “You’re telling me now. When we are in Tokyo. Alone. No other schoolmates, family, or familiar things around. And Chii-chan’s at Waseda with the Yamashita-kun who beat you to the punch.”

When Hotaro had had enough time to put this together in that brilliant mind of his, he jerked his head back up to glare at Satoshi. “I’m not saying I like you just because you’re here.”

Satoshi leaned back, both arms now dangling over the railing. He grinned, the sly show of teeth that always made Hotaro twitch. “Oh? Then disprove the theory.”

“Easy.” His voice was bored. Normal Hotaro. “Loneliness doesn’t necessarily transform feelings of friendship to romance. There’s not enough proof in your theory for me to disprove.”

Of course. It sounded so obvious when Hotaro said it. How had he not seen that himself? He wanted to laugh it off. But the anger was still there. He wondered what would happen if he let it build up. Would he slam something like he used to slam the game console at the arcade he and Hotaro used to go to in middle school? Would he do something so embarassing?

“Now what?” Hotaro again, pulling him out of himself. When had Hotaro started bringing other people back to reality? “Was that your only objection? What’s your answer? And don’t think,” lower, sharper. “I’ll let you run like you did with Ibara.”

Mayaka, huh? That had reached its natural conclusion when she stayed in Kamiyama to finish her education and he, Hotaro and Chii-chan all came to Tokyo together. What would he feel when she called one day to tell them that she’d found a boyfriend? Regret?

That would be ironic. Fitting, but ironic.

Come to think of it. He turned, putting his back to the rose-coloured lights on the other side of the water. Over here, there were just street lamps. A road that could have been anywhere in any city in Japan. “Here’s my other objection.”

“You have another one?”

“Why do you like me?”

“Hah?” Hotaro was irate now. Laziest Person On the Planet was vibrating on the soles of his zip-up winter boots.

But Satoshi was angry too. So it was fitting. For once, at the moment of Hotaro’s decision to reach out to him in a different way, they were on the same wavelength. 

“First, Mayaka. Now you. Why do two people who are so good, so unlike anyone else, like someone like me?”

Hotaro’s gaze turned wary. Satoshi knew that look. It was his friend’s way of saying that he didn’t understand. Hotaro was cautious about the things he didn’t understand. They gave off danger signals to a person who lived in the grey like he did, neon lights saying ‘don’t come over here, I’m a waste of energy’. “People don’t like other people for any particular reason.”

“Is that a theory? Or an old saying? Because scientific research indicates that people like other people primarily for two reasons. One, because they get along. This is shown by the fact that the longest-lasting marriages happen between people who are each other’s best friends. Two, because they feel that the person they like is extraordinary in some way. Women, for example, are generally attracted to men who exude power, as per the wisdom of our hunter-gatherer ancestry.”

He was speaking too rapidly. Calmly, calmly. The tortoise won the race, didn’t it? 

 

But Satoshi wasn’t wanting to win any races. He was just a supporting character, one of those other animals they drew into the background but which had no role to play. In that case, how should he act? Set up the scene. That was it. He was setting the scene. On a bright sunny day, the tortoise, the hare and various other animals warmed up at the starting line…

“I’m your best friend. But I’ve been your best friend since middle school. And I’m not extraordinary. Even I can draw a conclusion from that, Hotaro.”

Folded arms. “You are trying to make me prove that I like you. That’s narcissistic.”

Hit the nail on the head. It was funny, that Hotaro knew Satoshi’s mind better than Satoshi did. And again, it sounded so obvious when he said it. 

He held one hand out in front of him, half a prayer. “Sorry. I’m afraid this is my best attempt at not running away. How about I make it worth your while? We’ll make it into a competition.”

Wary. “What competition?”

It was cruel. But he was angry. Angry, angry with the edge of obssession just beneath his feet. It was worse than it had been with Mayaka. With Mayaka, there had been no need for rage. With Mayaka, Satoshi had done the hurting. Satoshi was too selfish a person to obssess over penitence. Revenge though. 

Revenge was different.

He said, “A race. To see if you can prove that you like me before I prove that you still like Chii-chan.”

Hotaro tensed, wrinkles gathering like thunder. Of course. Satoshi had brought his beloved Chii-chan into their fight. Satoshi was quiet, let him work himself silently to a more reasoned response. “And what,” Hotaro grated out. “Does the winner get? If I don’t have to do it, I won’t. If I have to, then I’ll…”

“Do it quickly.” Satoshi finished for him. Even Chii-chan hadn’t been able to get rid of that motto. Or at least, Hotaro’s belief that he still believed his motto. “The winner gets to ask one question. Any question. And the loser has to answer it. Honestly.”

Not impressed. “So we’ll be back to square one.”

“That’s my specialty.” He threw his arms out wide, taking in exactly nothing. “Digression! Are you up for it?”

What would he do if Hotaro said no? Satoshi didn’t have a clue. 

And anyway, what he said when he was finished sighing, long and deep, was “Yes.”

 

The rustle of blankets. The pause, as Sho looked down at him. Probably re-orienting himself to the presence of someone else. Then getting up, the pad of feet on tatami mats. The click of the bathroom door. Water running. 

Muneyoshi was so tired. He didn’t want to get up. He didn’t have to get up, just yet. But the annoying thing about his being a light sleeper was that he’d never been able to go back to sleep. Did Sho know that about him? As his eyes opened, he found himself looking at his left hand. Lying on the border between their futons, which Sho had pushed together out of a sheer lack of space.

It had never mattered to him before, what Sho knew or didn’t know. 

His jeans scraped against his crotch, clung stiffly to his legs when he turned over onto his back. He sat up, thought about pushing the blanket off, and then decided against it. It was way too cold. Wrapping them around himself instead, pulling a fold over his head like a hood, he peered out at his surroundings. He hadn’t been able to get a look, when they were talking.

How much had changed, in the two and a half years since he last came over? Or three. That last visit, he hadn’t looked around much either. Just mocked Sho for all the paper lying around his usually neat room, the ink on his usually clean face, the dirt on his usually well cared for glasses.

There was now an empty vase on the windowsill. A present, maybe. It was nicer than anything Sho would have bought himself. Same for the painting hanging on the rusted nail that the two of them had thought about getting off the wall, for safety’s sake and then given up on when they couldn’t so much as budge it. It was some abstract piece. Something Sho got probably, but which Muneyoshi couldn’t make head nor tail of.

The same manga was arranged on the shelves according to series, series according to Sho’s own internal order, with the oldest and most thumbed through sitting where it was easiest to reach from the desk. The tools were no longer laid away neatly, and there were ink stains on the wood. Sho must have been so consternated when that happened. It made Muneyoshi smile. 

Thinking of Sho consternated reminded him of last night. Muneyoshi groaned, scrubbed his hands over his eyes. 

Why had he done that?

Because his best friend had looked so different. The same face, the same sweep of dark green hair over his left eye, the same amber eyes. But older. More grounded. Surer of himself, the way people had always thought he was, even in second year, when stress and anger and guilt had all jumbled up inside him and incited so many fights that Muneyoshi, not knowing what to do with it all, had incited right back. 

Because Sho had looked so happy. So proud of himself in the same way Muneyoshi used to be proud of him that their shared elation became a channel, and he’d had had to kiss him. 

No, he’d made that excuse before. He hadn’t had to do anything. He’d wanted to.

He slapped his face with his hands. Hard enough that it stung. He couldn’t believe it. How had he managed to take Sho’s achievement and make it about himself? “Sorry,” he mumbled into his palms. 

But Sho had said he liked it.

Now his skin was heating up. He pulled the blanket further down, tight over his mouth and nose like a mummy’s bandages, and breathed in the flowery smell of Sho’s regular brand of detergent. 

Okay. There were better things he could be doing with his time, instead of thinking about himself. Shuffling to his feet, blanket tugged back to cover just his hair again, he squinted down at the papers scattered over his friend’s desk.

“Wow,” he breathed, picking up a sheet. Had Sho been able to draw an expression as nuanced as that before? Had he known how to use panels in this way? And how he shaded in the backgrounds. That was amazing. No wonder he’d been runner up for the Tezuka Prize. Muneyoshi felt another stab of vicarious pride.

Just as he put the sheet down, the bathroom door slid open. Sho’s hair was almost black when it was wet, clinging to his neck and trickling water onto the collar of what must be his work shirt. There was a logo on the chest pocket, but no name. 

Muneyoshi realised that he was staring and snapped his attention back to the sheet in his hand. He held it up. “This is really good. Your submission?”

Sho’s glasses were fogged up. He took them off, waved them around in a useless but habitual gesture, and then put them back on. Squinted at the page. Then did something weird with his mouth that Muneyoshi knew was a cross between exasperation, awkwardness and a smile. “Yeah.”

“Can I read it?”

“Uh,” his friend had turned away from him, was fumbling around the table he’d pushed to the side last night. Muneyoshi saw him dig a bag out of somewhere, then head into the kitchen. Cupboard doors opened and slammed shut. Sho re-emerged with two plastic-wrapped sandwiches. “Sure.”

Throwing one sandwich at Muneyoshi, he walked over to the desk and gathered all the papers up, tapped them on the edge so that they were all even and then arranged them into the proper order. Held them out. “I have to go though, so if you don’t mind locking up after then…”

“How long is your shift?”

Sho blinked, then blinked faster, then said, “Eight hours. Sorry. Uh…”

This was stupid. It must have been the kiss. Was this why they were so awkward around each other now? Muneyoshi wanted to slap himself in the face again. Instead of doing that, he tapped the sandwich in his hand against Sho’s head. 

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “I was just asking. We haven’t seen each other in a while, that’s all, and I had nothing to do today, so. But you’re right. Eight hours is kind of a long time. I don’t think it’d be safe for me to just leave the key under the mat or something though. What if I took this back with me, and then returned it when I was done?”

It was only when he said this that he realised it wasn’t that good an idea, handing someone your one and only copy of a manuscript when they could so easily lose it.

But Sho glanced at the sheets in his hand, at Muneyoshi, and then said, “Okay.”

“What?” he said, eyes narrowing behind his glasses. “I just said okay. Right?”

Muneyoshi schooled his expression into a normal smile. “You can put those down on the desk, Sho. I’ve only got so many hands and I’m not leaving my cocoon.”

“You could’ve turned up the heater. I don’t mind.”

“Your electricity bill minds though.”

This time, Sho smacked him on the head with his sandwich. The manuscript was too precious for that kind of rough handling. The manuscript, he put on the desk. Then he glanced at his watch. “Shi – ” A look at Muneyoshi. “Great. I’m going to be late.” 

He laughed.

Sho ignored him in favour of being on time. As he laced up his boots, he said, “You can use the shower if you want. And there’s more food in the fridge if you’re hungry. I checked the weather forecast and it might snow, so if you’re cold, there are more scarves in the closet and…”

He stopped when he said this. Looked up at Muneyoshi properly. Because Sho always did things properly. In his own way, even if he found it difficult to say, he never let Muneyoshi get away with anything. Anything important. “When you give me back that manuscript, we should talk. About last night.”

I don’t want to talk about it. Hadn’t Muneyoshi said that about a million times? To his other friends, the ones who knew enough to know something was wrong but not enough to know the part he’d played in it all. To Takeshi, Kaede. To himself, under the covers in his room, the lights off and his heart thumping in his ears. 

Muneyoshi pulled the blanket tighter around himself. Hidden within the folds, his other hand crushed the sandwich Sho had given him until it was nearly flat. 

Sho never let him get away with anything. But he’d become good over the years at changing the question. So, reminding himself of this he said, cheerfully, “Okay.”


	3. Chapter 3

Tamagawa University had been a shot in the dark. Literally. One night, when Hotaro was filling in his career form, he’d printed out a list of Tokyo-based private universities, stuck it up on his noticeboard, closed his eyes and jabbed with a pen. 

Other than that it was in Tokyo, had a program in criminology, and was well within his grade range, he didn’t really care. Considering he’d been sure to put in just this amount of effort, Tamagawa was a comfortable place. The teachers weren’t too strict, the courses not too hard. Buildings not too old, dorms not too cramped. He was a first year and he had a room to himself, complete with wash basin, small mirror and the ability to sit on his bed and use his desk at one and the same time. He shared two shower stalls and three toilets with the eleven other people on his floor, but none of them were his sister, so that was okay. 

In sum, Hotaro was in his grey version of heaven.

Except now he was expending energy being futilely angry with Satoshi. Why couldn’t the idiot have just rejected him like a normal person?

It was a good question, actually. Why had he fallen in like with a jerk?

First things first. He flipped open his exam pad, clicked his pen on. Since the incident with Irisu-senpai and another one in second year he would have been happy never to need to remember, he had started writing down all the information he got about a mystery. So that he couldn’t conveniently forget details like rope.

Now that he was away from Satoshi and his irritating face, he would consider the first argument that his friend had put forward again. Whilst it was true that loneliness alone didn’t transform friendship into romance, he couldn’t rule out loneliness as a factor. Could he be misunderstanding his feelings for Satoshi? Was it just an increased intimacy, a greater appreciation of a friend’s company in a strange place? How was that different from romance?

He tapped the blank paper before him. This was the problem. Romance was such an intangible, rose-coloured thing. Friendship was, too. Hotaro had had enough trouble wrapping his head around it with Chitanda, whom he didn’t think he had never not been attracted to. How was he supposed to disentangle them with regard to Satoshi?

Maybe he was looking at this from the wrong angle. Maybe instead of attempting to determine what the difference between romance and friendship was, he should determine only what had changed in his relationship with Satoshi. Solve the mystery, not the genre. He clicked the pen off, then on again. And wrote.

One. They spent more time together alone. 

But he and Satoshi used to hang out alone before Ibara and Chitanda. They spent hours playing arcade games. Hotaro didn’t spend much time with people outside of that. It made sense that, bar finding more people like Ibara and Chitanda, he would have gone back to his old habits.

Hotaro had the inkling that his reclusiveness was making the resolution of this mystery more difficult for him. Kaa-san had always said it would be his end.

Two. He wanted to spend time alone with Satoshi.

He had no objections to that. A definite difference. 

Three. He wanted to kiss Satoshi. 

He lowered his head onto the desk, pressed his cheek into the wood and stared blearily at his scrawl on the paper. This was the wrong angle. He wasn’t explaining why he’d fallen in like with his best friend. Just how he was.

If he didn’t have to do it, he wouldn’t. If he had to, then he’d do it quickly.

Was getting an answer out of Satoshi something he had to do?

His brain jumped traitorously to White Day, their third year at Kamiyama. Standing outside 1-A and watching some guy he didn’t know pushing up his glasses with a nervous hand and holding a heart-shaped box in the other, talking rapidly all the while. Chitanda had looked so politely, distressedly put upon. Why had she said yes?

He would never ask.

If he’d been the one to give her that box, say that to her, what would she have said?

He tried to rotate his pen around his fingers, like someone had showed him once. Some kid in middle school. He did it once like he always did, and then it fell and rolled away. Off the table. He shut his eyes. 

“I have to do it,” he muttered. “Huh?”

Pushing himself up off the desk, he flicked his eyes up to the ceiling. Then down to the desk again. He’d put his phone on top of his single row of books, between the Doraemon bookends Chitanda had gotten him for his birthday. She’d spent the past week going around with Ibara, getting unnecessarily worked up and thinking he hadn’t noticed, and ended up buying these from the stationery store near Kamiyama Primary. He couldn’t remember the name anymore, but he’d remembered the game they played. That day when for some reason they were alone in the clubroom.

All in all, it was a good present.

Maybe he should call Chitanda. Her hunches had kept him on track before. 

He picked up his phone, opened his dismal list of contacts and pressed ‘Call’. As he listened to the beep, he glanced out the window. It was only three thirty, but the sky was already growing dark. Winter in the city suited him. It went to sleep early like winter everywhere, and in the city it didn’t make much fuss, seeing as the urban heat island phenomenon meant there wasn’t much snow.

Trudging through the snow during winter in Kamiyama. Just thinking about it made Hotaro tired. Chitanda had loved it though. Her, and Mayaka, and Satoshi. Snow was their kind of rose-coloured event.

It occurred to him then that maybe Chitanda had class. The Tamagawa second-year science students spent all their time stuck in lectures and labs, like they’d gotten a head start and had already turned into their parents.

Before he could consider trying again later, the call connected. “Hello? Oreki-san?”

He scratched his head. “Chitanda. Sorry. Are you busy?”

“No, I…” There was a pause. “Now I’m not, no.”

Why had he called her again? She always did this to him. Made him confused. He wasted energy remembering the task before him. And then more energy remembering his manners. They weren’t in high school anymore. He hadn’t just seen her yesterday. “How are you?”

“I’m very well. And how are you?”

“Good.” Was that enough pleasantry?

“Oreki-san,” she said. “I’m sorry, was there anything specific? I’m not busy right now, but I’m needed elsewhere soon.”

What’s going on? He wanted to ask. But she was busy. Chitanda had become very busy in university. They only ever saw each other when they went home for the holidays now. But that was to be expected. She was at Waseda and he was at Tamagawa. What reason would they have to expend that much energy trying to see each other for a few short hours during term time?

“There was.” He leaned back in his chair, looked at but did not really see the Doraemon bookends in front of him. “But the explanation is rather long. If you have the time, can we meet up to talk about it?”

“Of course, Oreki-san! I’m always happy to see you.”

And with Chitanda’s usual polite efficiency, they set a date, a time and a place. And then she said goodbye and ended the call. 

Hotaro put down his phone. On top of his exam pad, where he’d written down three ways in which his relationship with Satoshi had changed. 

Maybe Satoshi’s suggested competition hadn’t just been spiteful. Maybe like he sometimes did, he had just known Hotaro better than Hotaro knew himself.

The call had brought up a more pertinent question, one he didn’t write down. How did he square his fallen-in-like with Satoshi with whatever he still felt for Chitanda?

 

Toudai’s Komaba Campus had big gates. Tall and grey, with an intricate black pattern on each side. It was the kind of gate he would have drawn at the start of a manga, if his characters were going to attend a scary fighting school. 

Not that he was going to draw one anytime soon. He had a manga to draw now, a very different manga, the kind he should have been drawing from the beginning. He’d already started on the first name. With this golden glow inside of him, he must have grinned at Mune like an idiot when his friend came into view. Mune waved, grinning back in that way he had of adjusting to other people’s emotional states. 

“You didn’t have to run,” Jiro said, when he’d fallen to a stop, hands on his knees and breathing hard. Mune must have run a long way, to be that winded. As far as he’d understood from their talk, his friend still ran as regularly as he had while on the high school track and field team.

Another wave, this time a dismissal. And then, “Sorry I’m late. Lecture ran over.” Hands wiped on jeans, unzipped a sling bag Jiro hadn’t seen before, dipped inside. The manuscript was just as it’d been when it’d left him, except that it was now lodged in a plastic folder, the flap of which was carefully tied down with string. 

He looked at his name written in black ink on the front page, then glanced up at his friend. His throat was dry.

Mune’s eyes went soft when he smiled. “It was amazing. I loved it. I’ll have to buy it anyway just so I have my own copy and you’ll have to sign…”

He grabbed the folder, wished that his mouth would stop twitching so obviously. “Like I said, Mune. Bad luck.” Swallowed. “You really think it’s good?”

“Yes.” There was a hand on his arm. Mune pulling him closer to the pillar so that two girls on their bicycles could pass through. They seemed to recognise him, because they called out greetings, which he replied. The hand was hot.

Jiro thought about the kiss. He’d thought about it periodically for the last three days. It was the subject of dreams and not-so-accidental-dreams that were embarassing to think about in broad daylight. 

Mune was talking. “You haven’t done mystery before, though. That was surprising. I mean, in second year, you kept saying you wouldn’t do mystery if it killed you. What made you change your mind?”

Growing up. That was the real answer. “I was stuck, so I gave it a go.”

When Mune started walking, he followed. Even though he wasn’t sure where they were going. There was concern in his friend’s voice. “Will that be okay though? You’ll have to continue mystery if you get serialised, and if you don’t have much experience writing it or you’re not sure if you like it…”

“I know I like it.” Maybe he hadn’t grown up that much after all. It came out sharp. 

But before he could apologise, Mune dropped his head. Exhaled. When he looked up again, he was smiling like normal. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve thought about it. It’s not like you to do something without considering it first.”

Then, turning his gaze forwards, he put a hand on Jiro’s shoulder, steered him into a crush of people at the edge of the street, where there was a pedestrian crossing. “You said you’re free tonight, right?”

He nodded. 

There was a glint in his friend’s warm eyes. “You haven’t tried my cooking in ages.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Come on, I’ve gotten better. I swear.”

The light was still red. At this time of day, the road was starting to pack with cars. Jiro had just missed the evening rush, taking the subway here. “I don’t believe you.”

“I learnt to make oyakodon.”

“You did?” Shit. He was trapped. 

“I’ll cook it for you!” The light shifted to green. They walked across. It should have been hard to hear Mune when everyone was hurrying across at the same time. But Kamiyama’s student council president had always had a clear, carrying voice. “And then there’s something I need to show you. I think you’ll be happy when you see it.”

He frowned. “What?”

Mune looked like an angel, Jiro had heard a girl say once. She had been sitting just beneath the stage on the day they opened the cultural festival. What she didn’t know was that in profile, that angelic smile turned wicked. Mune opened his mouth, maybe to say something tantalisingly vague, maybe to tell him straight out, but then bumped into someone. 

Instead of apologising and moving on, Mune stood still. That slack look that Jiro had seen after they kissed was on his face. Then his eyes widened, strained at the corners, like he was about to panic. 

The light was red. Jiro reached for his friend, but the stranger’d already pulled him onto the curb. Gripping Mune’s elbow too hard, not hard enough, finally letting go, sticking the hand back in his jacket pocket. When Jiro closed in on them, got a good look at the guy’s face, he saw that he was around their age. Hair in soft, black curls and a sharp face even sharper with what seemed like embarassment.

“Muneyoshi,” he began. 

“Takeshi.” It was an order. Then Mune looked up into Takeshi’s face and gave him a polite, friendly smile. “Sorry, I can’t talk right now. I’m with a friend.”

Jiro and Takeshi exchanged glances. But there was no attempt to introduce them.

“Okay, but we have to talk about it at some point.”

“No.” This time, he didn’t soften it. Jiro didn’t think he could have. Not when it wasn’t an order. Not when it was more like an outburst, a plea to just stop. “I’m tired of talking.”

Takeshi frowned. His voice was terse. “We’re all tired of talking. Do you think I want to? We have to. Problems don’t just go away, Muneyoshi. You and Kaede are just the same, always running away. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of having to say, we need to talk, all the time, while the two of you do whatever you want. I was wrong this time, I know that, but it’s not like you did nothing. You know that, right? You know you didn’t just sit back and take it.”

As soon as he said that, whatever it meant, he looked like he regretted it. 

But Mune’s shoulders were hunching. His head was bowed. Jiro had had enough. He took his friend’s arm, tugged him beyond the barrier of Takeshi’s body. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go.”

If Takeshi had wanted to apologise, he didn’t now. 

When they came to a stop at the end of the street, at another pedestrian light, Jiro asked, “What was his problem?”

In profile, unsmiling, Mune looked like any ordinary university student. Until his eyes slid sideways, and his lips quirked, and he wasn’t just a photograph anymore, a silhouette in the wash of winter’s evening. He was recognisable. “You know that thing I said I wanted to show you? What if we skip dinner and do that first?”

The light turned green. The crush of people peeled away from them, out onto the street. Jiro decided to let it go for now. Said, “Does that mean you aren’t cooking?”

“I’m cooking.”

“Huh.”

“You were going to swear, weren’t you?”

“Would you stop that?”

Entering Mune’s apartment, Jiro became aware of how distant they’d become. It wasn’t like he hadn’t realised it before, especially back at that crossing, with the guy named Takeshi. But there was something about physical space that impressed itself upon him, perhaps because sheets were blank spaces before you drew on them. 

The place was bigger than his. Just a bit. Meant for two people. A tiny kitchen with a sofa and a TV pushed up against one side so that it could double as a living room, four doors that must lead to two bedrooms, a bathroom and a supply closet. In small apartments, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out what lay behind closed doors.

There were things that Jiro knew didn’t belong to Mune, such as the row of cacti on the windowsill and the Pokémon cushion covers. Other things, like the yellow mugs Mune had brought with him from home, and the sketchbook stuck between sofa arm and sofa seat, he recognised. He pulled the sketchbook out. “You need to take better care of your things.” 

Turning it around, he looked at the cover. The kanji for ‘fourteen’ was printed on it in Mune’s thin, elegant script. “Can I look?”

“You know you can,” his friend called over his shoulder, disappearing into one of the rooms. Jiro caught a glimpse of an unmade bed. Resisted the urge to tell Mune he should make it. The difference between the two of them had always been that whereas Jiro was organised about nearly everything, Mune only bothered to organise what he considered to be important. It made his life an uneven chaos of order and disorder.

He flipped open the sketchbook. The usual collection of random pencil sketches, a few done in ink and a rare watercolour near the front. Mune must have brought his paints with him to Tokyo at some point. The watercolour was characteristically a postcard-like Mount Fuji, except in weird colours. Mune could be whimsical about colours. It seemed that here, he’d decided that Mount Fuji should be shaded in rainbow with a thick black outline, as if he were a kindergartner again, colouring within self-imposed lines. 

It was unfair, that whimsy could produce something so good. 

Jiro tamped down on the twinge of jealousy. Kept flipping. Takeshi appeared a few times. A girl with long black hair, a small round face. He wondered if this was Kaede. They both disappeared about three quarters in. When he was near the end, he grasped what was disturbing him.

There were no sketches of him. What a narcissistic unconscious expectation to have.

“Anything you like?” His friend’s voice at his shoulder made him jump. Mune laughed. 

He turned his eyes back to the sketchbook. Said, “The Mount Fuji one was good.”

“Was it?” 

Shutting the sketchbook, he sat on the arm of the sofa. Mune stood before him. He was holding something behind his back, but waiting to see if Jiro had anything else to say. He wasn’t a kid anymore, so he said, evenly, “How did you get the idea?”

Mune tipped his head to the side, glanced up at the ceiling as he thought. “Nowhere, really. I just thought it would be fun. It turned out well, though, didn’t it?”

The answer he’d hated most in high school. It turned out well. As if the piece had drawn and painted itself. But, remembering the way Mune had apologised earlier, he said nothing until he could say it without snapping. “What did you want to show me?”

With a flourish, Mune dropped the book into his lap. The book. A worn exercise book with Kamiyama High School embossed on the front, katakana crammed into the space between the school logo and the personal details box at the bottom. He felt sick. 

“Kudryavka’s Order.”

He knew that. What was the point of saying it when he knew?

Mune leaned an elbow on the back of the sofa, his face close to Jiro’s, looking down at the book too. “I found it when I was looking for something. Looks like I crammed it into one of those boxes we brought the first time.”

He was speaking. That was his voice. Why? He was over this. He’d had a success of his own. He had a high chance of being serialised, in Jump of all places. Why did he care about a manga that had been sold at a cultural festival in a small mountain town, a plot that had never been brought to life? “You should have unpacked those properly in the first week.”

Mune’s breath was warm on his cheek. “I know, I know. Anyway. I found this after I read your manuscript, and I read it.”

“You read it?”

A shrug. “I read it a long time ago. But I read it again yesterday and well. Since exams are over and all, and I really owe Anjou now, I thought I would draw it.”

“Sho?”

“Sho, are you okay?”

Every muscle in his body was taut. If Mune slipped the book out of his hands right now, he wouldn’t be able to let go. His fingers wouldn’t listen to him. They would have nothing to listen to. His brain had shut down completely. Frothing over with a bitter irony. A bitterer resentment.

Mune touched him so easily. A finger poking his shoulder. Bending over to stare into his face. He blinked, and then he was himself again. Or at least he was cold as ice.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “If you felt like doing something fun.”

Curious. “What?”

“Let’s both draw it.”

Had Mune known about it in high school? His jealousy. He got his answer right then. When his best friend stared into his cold face, and collected his own features into a controlled neutrality. “What would be the point of that, Sho? You’re a professional. In real competitions, they separate people like you and me.” 

Silence. Jiro let the words melt into him, reason take over. Mune was right. There was no point to drawing two manuscripts for one story. He had his names to think about. He was supposed to produce five for the serialisation board. He didn’t have enough time as it was.

And then Mune continued speaking. “You know, maybe you should draw it. You’ll probably do it more justice.”

Reason snapped. 

“No.” His voice was a knife. “We should have a competition. For fun.”

Mune breathed in, just as sharp. “Okay then. Anjou can judge it. I’ll ask Irisu for her contact information tomorrow.”

Are you happy now, was the unspoken addition.

This was what jealousy did. What he’d hoped he’d left back in high school, along with ripped streamers, stolen ladles and old manuscripts he’d wanted to burn but didn’t, because it was too dramatic. 

It made Mune’s face cave into exhaustion. A plea. “I’ll make us dinner now, okay? Oyakodon. I promise it’s not as bad as you think it is.”

“If you say so.” Up off the sofa. “I’ll help.”

“That’s just your way of saying you don’t trust me, isn’t it.”

“You can take it that way.”

Then the both of them to the fridge, pulling it open, going for the onions. “It’s my fridge, Sho, do you really think – hey!”

Jealousy made Jiro feel like shit.


	4. Chapter 4

Love was a combination of three components: passion, intimacy and commitment. Different combinations yielded seven different forms of love, the most popularised ones of which were romantic, composed of intimacy and passion, and consummate, composed of all three and thus the ideal form of love. 

This was psychologist Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory. 

Like all theories, there were its naysayers. Do people really view the forms of their relationships in the same way? Could love even be separated so easily into different forms? Most importantly for Hotaro and Satoshi would be: what caused one form of love to change into another?

That question, it seemed was largely unanswered. 

If that wasn’t difficult enough, Susan and Clyde Hendrick proposed that consummate love was a cultural construct, brought about by the increasing prevalence of individualistic ideologies, and thus inward shifts in world views. 

Satoshi, as a database, shouldn’t draw conclusions from this. He should be e-mailing them to Hotaro, so that Hotaro could do that vital task. He nearly did, before he remembered, and with a wry shake of his head, re-pocketed his phone. This was a competition. Each man for himself. 

In that case, what conclusion could be drawn from these theories of love?

Satoshi didn’t know.

Well. There were other ways to win than the making of an abstract argument. And here she was already, waving to him from halfway down the street.

“Chii-chan,” he chirped when she was near enough. 

“You’ve been waiting, Fukube-san.”

“Only a bit.” Then he stepped back, took in her outfit and said, “Whoa, Chii-chan, is that your furisode? You look beautiful!”

She blushed. “Thank you.”

He let her up the steps before him, held the traditional navy flaps out of her way as she entered. A waitress led them to a tearoom near the end, and Chii-chan asked her to bring green tea.

Satoshi put his chin on his hand. “Is it okay for me to be dressed like this? I don’t have any formal wear or anything. I’m just wearing a shirt.”

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “It’s enough that you’re helping me, Fukube-san.”

He grinned. “It’s my job to help you, Chii-chan. I’m your PA, right? Personal assistant.” The English words came out weird. He could never speak as smoothly as, in middle school, he’d wanted to. But he was used to that. He’d wanted a lot of things back then that he’d since accepted he didn’t need.

She smiled back, all sweetness and light. No wonder Hotaro liked her, he thought. They were so different. The stereotype of opposites attract. 

“Fukube-san?”

Had his irritation shown in his face? He hoped not. Spiteful as he’d been about dragging Chii-chan into this in the first place, he didn’t want to hurt her. Chii-chan was a good person, just like Mayaka was a good person. They deserved better.

Which brought him to today’s mission. 

If he couldn’t make a theory, make reality instead. 

“How are you and Yamashita-kun now, Chii-chan?”

She folded her hands beneath the table, closed her eyes and sighed, low and soft. “We’re much better. It has been much less,” she hesitated. “Awkward.”

He didn’t touch her. It seemed weird to. For him to touch an ou-furisode so beautiful, the most formal kimono of its particular kind, and so rarely made now that it was as if he were looking at a museum piece. But he leaned his elbow on the table until Chii-chan made a polite noise at him to sit properly, and looked at her sympathetically. 

“If you need to talk about it, I’m always happy to listen.”

Her hair was done up exquisitely. It didn’t look like Chii-chan’s hair in the dim lighting of the tearoom. More like it’d come out of a film shown in high definition on the cinema screen. Vividly from another time. But Chii-chan’s voice was very present, very much a friend’s voice. “Thank you, Fukube-san. That’s very kind of you. But enough about me. How have you been?”

His opening. He shut an eye, stuck a tongue out. “I got into a bet with Hotaro.”

“Oreki-san?” There was a strange glint in her eyes. He wondered if Hotaro would have taken that as a clue. Chii-chan must still like him, to have such an instinctive reaction to his name. She must. 

“Chii-chan,” he said. “When we were in high school, did you like Hotaro?”

“Like?” Her cheeks were turning red again. It went well with the scarlet of her furisode. “Like. Oreki-san and I were very good friends…”

“Love,” he corrected. “Romantically. Did you have a crush on him?”

Beneath the table, he saw her fidget. “That was all a long time ago, Fukube-san.” She sounded almost admonishing. “Why are you asking?”

The lack of answer was enough. Man, Chii-chan was bad at lying. 

“The tea is here,” she said. With clear relief in her voice. “I’ll put the water on, and by the time Takeda-san and the others arrive, it should have boiled.”

He should be happier. He was a database, and for once a conclusion he’d drawn from his data set had been proven right, without the wave of Hotaro’s magic wand. But what he felt was cold. Tired. What was this? 

Staring down at his hand, palm up in his lap, the lifeline visible under the lights, he wondered, had he wanted Hotaro to be right?

“Fukube-san.” 

He looked up. “Yes?”

Chii-chan’s mouth was turned down at the ends. With her otherwordly hair and in her untoucheable kimono, the simple expression of discontent became forbidding. “It was not very nice of you to ask me a question like that, when I had just ended my relationship with Yamashita-san.”

He leaned forward, put his hands together in proper prayer-like fashion. “Sorry, Chii-chan. It was very insensitive of me.”

She nodded, once. Then smiled at him. As he watched her put the water on to boil, he found himself thinking, when had Chii-chan learned to stand up for herself like that? When had Mayaka moved on? When had Hotaro changed?

Was this the price he paid, not caring about anything?

One day, would they all simply leave him behind?

The navy curtains over the tea room were pulled back, admitting two men whose photos he’d seen when he was researching their company in the morning. He imitated the way Chii-chan bowed to them. When his head came up, he was smiling.

 

Hotaro had been sitting in the café for five minutes when he got the call. The pale sun on his face, the artificial heat especially warm when he was sitting next to the window, aware of how cold the unfortunate human beings were despite their coats and scarves. It wasn’t like Chitanda to make him wait. But she had been busy since university started. Boyfriends, business meetings, and studying could do that. He hoped she wasn’t overdoing it, with the meetings. In their last year of high school, even going to one had made her look like she wanted to sleep for a week.

He tested the word out again. Boyfriend. It didn’t provoke any special reaction from him. Just a vague irritation. But he didn’t know if he would ever look at Yamashita and not feel irritated. Having the carpet pulled out from under you did that to a person. He felt the same way about Irisu-senpai. 

He was thinking about this when he got the call. It was from an unknown number. Probably spam. He didn’t bother to hide his residual irritation when he answered. 

“I’m sorry if this is a bad time,” said the voice. Polite and cheerful, like the winter sun outside. “Is this Oreki Hotaro?”

It didn’t sound like spam. Cautiously, he said, “Yes. Who is this?”

“Kugayama Muneyoshi. I was a year ahead of you at Kamiyama High. Irisu Fuyumi gave me your contact information. I hope that was all right.”

Kugayama Muneyoshi. The name was burned into his mind, after all that trouble that that first cultural festival had gone to, getting him to remember it. 

“It’s all right.” It was too late to change it, now. “Can I help you?” No. Definitely not.

“I’m looking for someone,” said Kugayama-senpai. “And Irisu tells me that you are a talented detective.”

Talent. He hated that word. “Not particularly.”

“Well, I would be very grateful if you could help me. It’s very important.”

And yet, despite himself, he was curious. Who would Kugayama Muneyoshi be looking for, that after so many years, he and Hotaro’s paths would cross again? Already, he could see Chitanda’s eyes sparkling, pushing too close to his face. And maybe because he was seeing Chitanda again after so long, and very soon, or maybe because at some point, as Satoshi and Ibara were always telling him, that part of her had become a part of him too, he couldn't ignore it. This mystery. “Who are you looking for?”

“A friend of mine. It seems that she disappeared a few years ago. You won’t know her name, but I’m looking for a girl called Anjou Haruna.”


	5. Chapter 5

Satoshi’s room was different because the person who lived in it was different. Hotaro knew that. Still, opening the door and looking inside sometimes felt like looking into an alien planet. 

There were ridiculous costumes hung one on top of the other on the single peg next to the door, a patchwork bedspread, a patchwork carpet, a variety of hats arranged on top of the cupboard that would not have been out of place on Halloween, books and brightly coloured clothes all over the floor, random figurines from a stint in first year in the Crafts Club, stuffed toys with the amateur stitches visible and neon pink thread staring out of the black buttons of their eyes, and Satoshi himself. Sitting at his desk surrounded in this mess, sewing an ear onto a teddy bear.

“Yo,” he said, without looking up. The stitches on this stuffed animal were going better. At least Hotaro couldn’t see them anymore. Satoshi still wouldn’t explain what had triggered his sudden interest in making toys instead of clothes. According to Satoshi, there was no explanation. “Close the door.”

Edging into the room, he did. “Why do you care. You don’t even lock it.”

Satoshi tilted his head back to look at him, grinned. “There’s a difference.” Back to stitching. “Well? What?”

Hotaro glanced down at the laptop he’d tucked under his arm, then at the back of his friend’s head. What Chitanda had said to him in the café was weighing on him. Making it more difficult to say normal things. 

She’d arrived, apologised for her lateness, ordered her coffee and listened to him explain his side of the problem. He had left out the fact that Satoshi had a different goal in their competition. He didn’t think it was fair to drag her further into this mess than she already was. It would just make her worry.

After her initial surprise and brief embarassment at the subject under discussion, she’d murmured, “That makes sense now.” Then looked so troubled, so much more subdued than he had expected she would that he froze. Didn’t think to ask her what made sense until she started speaking again. “Do you know what I’m curious about, Oreki-san?”

“What?”

She tipped her head to the side. “Why did Fukube-san want proof you like him?”

Walking over to Satoshi’s desk, he put the laptop down on it. “Other than in our competition, you can still help me out with other mysteries, right?”

The needle stilled. “Of course. Especially if it’s something that you want to solve, Hotaro. How could I resist?”

He didn’t like standing for so long. It was tiring. Pulling himself up onto Satoshi’s desk, he flipped open his laptop, found the correct window and showed it to his friend. Satoshi put his sewing down, peered at it. “An e-mail? Or more accurately, an e-mail and a reply to an e-mail.”

“Between Anjou Haruna and Yuasa Shoko.”

Satoshi put his elbows on the desk. “Yuasa-senpai was president of the Manga Society in first year. Anjou Haruna. The writer of A Corpse By Evening. Right?”

As expected, his best friend had a scary memory for names. When Satoshi had finished reading, he leaned back, looked at Hotaro. “What about the e-mails?”

“Anjou-san,” Hotaro said. “Writes that she’s coming back to Japan for university. Yuasa-senpai says that’s great, it’s nice to hear from her after so long, what university, if she’ll be home for her term break in late September to early October.”

“There’s no reply.” Satoshi’s hair was as short as it had been in high school. Clung to his face in wisps that made Hotaro want to touch, to push back and see if his skull was really shaped like that, or if hair that hid so little actually hid more. “If we assume Yuasa-senpai is not hiding something from us, there are two possible reasons for that. One, the reply went into the spam folder and senpai deleted it by accident. Two, Anjou-san never did reply.”

He shook his head. “That’s not important right now. Look at the wording. Yuasa-senpai asks her if she’ll be home for her term break in late September to early October. Why was she so specific?”

Satoshi tapped his chin. “You’re right. If it were me, I would have just asked if she would be home. Not to mention the question itself is out of the blue, seeing as they were talking about university.”

His friend swiped two fingers up Hotaro’s touchpad. “These e-mails were sent in 2002. When Anjou-san and Yuasa-senpai were in second year. The year of the storied Kamiyama High school trip.” A pause. “Did you ask senpai where they went?”

“It’s almost midnight.”

“Oh?” Satoshi rested his cheek on an upturned palm, smiling that sly smile he knew irritated Hotaro. “Is that why you’re relying on your trusty database?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Do you know?”

“You’re in luck. I do. They went to visit Nakijin Castle in Nakijin Prefecture, Okinawa. I don’t know why that would be important though. Anjou-san couldn’t have gone with them. She wasn’t a Kamiyama student anymore.”

And then. “Actually, that’s not strictly true.”

“What do you mean?”

“That year,” Satoshi said. “A student cancelled last minute, so they had space. I heard Tanaka-sensei talking about it in the staffroom. Kamiyama’s gone to the same place and stayed at the same hostel four years in a row. Our year was the first time we went somewhere different. It’s possible that the students organising the trip were invoiced for a certain number of spaces based on last year’s headcount, and paid the deposit using school funds before they were certain of the headcount for that particular year.”

A tap on the edge of the laptop. “If for some reason, the number of students signing on for the trip was far lower than estimated, then there would have been a lot of spaces to fill up. Enough that the organising committee would have considered allowing outsiders to join the trip.”

“Was there a reason?”

Satoshi pursed his lips. Then held up a finger. “Bingo. There was a second trip that year, organised by that new geography teacher, Akiyama-sensei. He took fifteen students with him to Tokyo to visit universities. It wasn’t held for us because there weren’t enough kids who said on their career forms that they were thinking of applying outside the prefecture.”

Hotaru crossed his arms. He didn’t realise he’d begun playing with his fringe until he saw Satoshi grinning at him. He stopped, but his best friend was already saying, “Have you come to your grand conclusion, Hotaro?”

He glared. 

“All right,” Satoshi said agreeably. “I’ll sum up. Anjou-san told Yuasa-senpai she was coming back for university, and Yuasa-senpai asked her if she would be coming back that term break, probably because she wanted to ask if Anjou-san would like to go on the trip. Is that it? Was that what you wanted to know?”

After a moment, Hotaro said, “Senpai said in her e-mail that she hadn’t heard from Anjou-san in a long time.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Satoshi. Would you ask someone you hadn’t been in touch with for a while, do you want to go on a trip together?”

A frown. “It was a school trip, Hotaro.”

“But, would it be the first thing you said in the first e-mail you sent them?”

“Well…probably not. It’s kind of…”

“Presumptuous.” He bowed his head, fingers twisting through his fringe. Letting the relative darkness, the repetitive movement, centre him. It came to him. “Yuasa-senpai must have believed that Anjou-san would want to go. Nakijin Castle, or something else in Nakijin Prefecture. It must have some meaning for her.”

Then he leaned back against the wall, shut his eyes. “But that’s not the answer.”

Satoshi put his arms on his hips. “Hotaro,” he said. “Now that you’ve figured something out, can you tell me what this was all about? I’m still in the dark. Why are you looking at these e-mails? What’s the mystery? Why couldn’t you just wait until tomorrow morning to ask Yuasa-senpai?”

He slid his gaze sideways, to the heap of too-bright costumes on the peg. 

“Hotaro? It’s a stupid reason, isn’t it?”

A finger dug into his cheek. He didn’t react. But then Satoshi’s breath was in his ear. His mouth forming the words, “I. Ri. Su.”

He shoved his friend away. 

“It was! You really know how to keep a grudge, Hotaro. Did she ask you to do this? Whatever it is.”

He remembered the ‘Strength’ tarot card that Satoshi had assigned him. The implication that he was being controlled by a woman. His mood soured further. “No,” he said. “It’s not her. Kugayama Muneyoshi called me yesterday.”

“Kugaya – the student council president? The key to the whole ABC incident. Ah,” that sly smile again. He could see it even though he was still staring at the ridiculous costumes. “But Irisu-senpai recommended you to him, right? What did you say? You could find out whatever it was by the end of the day? Day, being exactly midnight.”

Hotaro didn’t answer.

His best friend dropped back into his seat. The wheels squeaked. “So? What did he ask you to do?”

When he was certain Satoshi was being serious again, he turned back around. “He asked me to look for Anjou-san. According to Irisu-senpai, she disappeared after she came back to Japan three years ago. Her parents don’t know where she is. She doesn’t have Facebook. She’s left no Internet prints at all.”

Satoshi raised his eyebrows. “The police aren’t involved?”

“She e-mailed her parents to tell them she was okay.”

“A kidnapper could have made her send that.” Satoshi wagged a finger before Hotaro could speak. “But only a hundredth of a percent of missing person cases are actually kidnappings. And her parents believed her, for certain reasons, so they didn’t contact the police. Do you know what reasons?”

“Her father wouldn’t say.”

“That hurts. Was he very cold to you, Hotaro?”

The look on his face made Satoshi laugh. “So are these e-mails, other than the e-mail to her parents, are the last communication with her that we know of?”

“With people from Kamiyama, yes. And a year before she actually disappeared. That’s as far as I could track.” 

“I see.” Satoshi was quiet for a moment. Then his head bobbed up, and he grinned at Hotaru. “Okay. Leave it to me. The trusty database,” he punched the air in front of him several times, as if he were a kid warming up before a playground wrestle. “Will get you the information you need.” 

Nodding to himself, sharp and more assured than he ever was inside, Satoshi said, “You can just tell him what you know for now, right? Enough puzzle pieces there to console you in your testosterone-fuelled, one-sided battle royale with Irisu-senpai.”

Hotaro’s sucked in a breath. “You.”

“That’s a poor insult, Hotaro. But I’ll let you off for now.” Satoshi flapped his hands at him. “Now shoo. I have to finish this in time for Sewing Club tomorrow.”

He dragged himself off the desk. Stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “Thanks in advance.”

A needle was waved in his direction. “No need for that. Databases have their jobs to do, don’t they. Goodnight.”

Database, huh?

Chitanda’s hands curved around her cup, warming herself, “You said, Oreki-san, that Fukube-san called this competition between you a digression. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Fukube-san wouldn’t consider a competition with you to be a digression, because he doesn’t think he can win.”

Had Chitanda cottoned on to that? She’d never said anything. He sipped his coffee. Too bitter. “Why wouldn’t it be a digression if he couldn’t win?”

She paused. “I’m sorry. I’m not being very clear. I think what I mean to say is, Fukube-san doesn’t like to do things that aren’t fun. A competition where the winner seems obvious to him wouldn’t be fun, would it?”

He hadn’t thought about it like that. Stirring some cream into his coffee, he said, “Then there must be another reason why he wanted to have a competition.”

“Yes. Did he say anything else to you?”

Hotaro ticked off the points in Satoshi’s rant on his fingers. “I was confusing romance with friendship. There wasn’t any reason why I would like him. I liked…” Right. “Someone else, before.”

Chitanda bowed her head. Her voice was soft. “Is that all?”

He looked at his fingers. “Yeah.” Then he buried his fingers in his hair, and sighed.

“It’s difficult, isn’t it?” 

Her skin was so pale in the winter light. Her fingers, thin and elegant around her cup. Hotaro couldn’t deny that he still found her attractive. Even without their friendship, without everything good that he knew about her, objectively speaking, Chitanda was pretty. With them, she was beautiful. 

Was that love?

She raised the cup to her lips, blew lightly at the steam curling up from him. It wafted across to him, dissipated before he could feel its heat. “But if it’s you, Oreki-san, I’m sure you can find the answer.”

Or, he thought, looking at Satoshi’s back now, was this?

He shut the door behind him. 

Man, he just wanted to go back to his grey life. 

 

There was a stack of Weekly Shonen Jump in the supermarket, on a rack near the cashier. Muneyoshi had been learning all about product promotion in business class. He knew that the rationale behind the rack placement was probably that people might have finished their shopping, have a little more room in their basket, kids who would be attracted by pretty front covers, or some free time, and then the magazines and newspapers would be right there for their browsing and purchasing convenience.

Muneyoshi was one of those snared consumers. Placing his basket between his feet, he picked up a copy of Jump, checked the contents and flipped to the right page. It was weird to see the name of someone he knew on real manga paper. He wondered if Sho had seen it yet. 

The edition had come out just this morning. It was only ten a.m. But he remembered that mangaka got advanced copies of editions that they were published in.

He took his phone out of his jacket pocket and turned on the camera. Angling it at the magazine in his hand, he snapped a photo. Typed ‘congratulations’, and pressed ‘Send’. When he looked up, the cashier was eyeing him.

“Sorry,” he said with a smile. “Don’t worry. I’m buying it.”

Back in his apartment, he climbed into the warmth of his bed and read the story again. Knowing as he did what happened next, he could go more slowly, appreciate the art, the panelling, the pace of the storytelling.

Done, he closed the magazine, rolled over onto his back within the cocoon of his blankets, and stared up at the ceiling. It looked impassively back. 

Why was Sho still jealous of him, even though he could draw as well as this?

He didn’t understand. 

Why was it necessary for them to compete?

He didn’t want to compete.

Why had he said yes?

Groaning, he pulled the covers over his head. Breathed into the darkness instead. Shut his eyes and let the warmth sink in, seep into his skin and tug, tug him softly into the waters of sleep.

His phone beeped. He wasn’t going to get it.

It beeped again. Reluctantly, he threw off the covers. The cold bit. He should have turned up the thermostat before he went on his grocery run. All the heat always bled away in the night.

He’d left his coat on the floor. Shivering, he felt in both pockets, found his phone, and then jumped back into bed. Both texts were from Sho. Just ‘thanks’ and ‘want to come over I’ll make you real oyakodon’. 

Sho’s texting grammar was one of the most eccentric things about him. He always wrote in full words, no emoticons. And yet, there were no uppercase letters or full stops in sight. 

As he was about to type, he got another beep.

Without thinking, he pressed ‘back’ to his list of messages. His fingers tensed. Five unread texts from Kaede now. The first line burning into his eyes before he could tap to return to his conversation with Sho.

‘you fucking backstabbing…”

To Sho, he typed, ‘sure, what time?’ Then slid his phone under his pillow and tugged the blankets back over his head. His nose pressed to the mattress. Breathing in the same flowery smell that Sho’s sheets had. They had the same brand of detergent. Bought them at a convenience store near Sho’s apartment their third week here, when there was enough dirty clothing lying around their rooms that Mune could now cash in on his friend’s promise to teach him how a washing machine worked.

Sho had said this was the same brand of detergent he used back home. His nose crinkling in that way he had when he was being wry. Sho’s response to most things about his home life was wry. The only time Muneyoshi could remember him reacting differently was that night the summer of their third year, when his best friend had climbed up the pipe outside his house, tapped on the window of his balcony and then slipped into his room like a real anime character love interest. All to tell him that his parents really believed that he was going to give in and just go to university, be a doctor or a lawyer or something, like they wanted.

When Sho was angry, he grew cold. 

He’d been cold the day before yesterday. For fun, he’d said. Yeah, right.

Muneyoshi wanted to laugh. But he couldn’t laugh with his nose pressed into the mattress like this. He could barely breathe.

He had read Kudryavka’s Order again on a high, happy to have met Sho again, excited that someone he knew’d actually fulfilled a dream. One of those cotton candy clouds he and his classmates snatched from the air when they were bored, the teacher absent, the homework maybe less than normal, or simply kicking about, too lazy to do the work they did have.

All the plans. All the promises. Not just a self-indulgence, now, but real. Tangible. 

Sho had made something outside of himself.

Why couldn’t Muneyoshi do that too?

He hadn’t wanted it to be a competition.

Turning his head so that he was lying on the side of his face, he stared at the magazine. He’d left it under the blankets when he got up. The cover was smooth to the touch. His fingers closed over the spine, and he pulled it towards him. Lightly, he smacked himself on the cheek.

This wasn’t about him. 

He should have known better anyway. He’d walked into his old relationship with Sho, and believed he wouldn’t be walking into the old problems too. They were different, the two of them, but not so different. 

Now that he’d recalibrated his expectations, he could balance himself better. Appreciate the good with the bad, as always. Sho did the same for him.

And something good had come out of the competition too. He’d learned something about a friend that he had all but forgotten. It seemed strange, to think that for three years someone he knew’d walked out of all her loved ones’ lives just like that, and it had never even crossed his radar.

He and Anjou-san weren’t close in high school. Just a writer and an artist in the same club, who liked the same genre of manga. Still. It would be nice to know if she were happy. He wondered how much Oreki-kun had been able to find out about her.

His phone beeped. 

Beeped again.

Reaching under his pillow, he rescued it. The first was from Sho. ‘seven okay?’

The second was from Kaede. What was she doing, texting him twice in one morning? It was a Monday. Had she gone and gotten herself drunk again? 

He sent an ‘okay’ to Sho, then dropped his phone on the floor. It hit the soft folds of his coat. Maybe he should learn how to block contacts. 

‘you fucking liked it’


	6. Chapter 6

“I thought you said you were going to cook oyakodon,” said Mune. He glanced up when the waitress put their steaming bowls in front of them, thanked her. Rushed as she was, strands of her dark hair sticking to her sweaty red face, she smiled back. 

Jiro tried not to think he was an evil human being, for not having thought to look properly at the person who was bringing him his food and been politely grateful. He picked up his chopsticks. “I did,” he admitted. “But my apartment’s a mess and it was a hassle to clean up.”

Not that this had been such a good idea. The restaurant Jiro usually went to when he was too tired to cook was okay when he was eating by himself. Good, cheap food. Reasonably bright lighting, and long tables with low stools, spaced far enough away from each other that he could eat and read at the same time, and he wouldn’t be knocking elbows with anyone. 

This was the problem. He usually read when he was here. Meaning that he hadn’t noticed how hard it was to hear anyone talking, especially since at seven thirty, it was now dinner hour. “Itadakimasu,” he muttered, still berating himself.

“Itadakimasu,” Mune said. Then slurped his soup. “This is good!”

“Eat properly.” It was automatic by now, and automatically, Mune ignored him. “You know, you always eat properly when we’re with other people.”

“But that’s other people.”

That statement, delivered between two instances of the loud chewing with an open mouth, should have been less touching than it was. He thought of the paper strewn all over his desk and floor, the manga, the photocopied version of Kudryavka’s Order he’d dropped on his shelf before meeting Mune at the door, and felt guilty. It had felt like he was fourteen again, hiding revision notes from that one classmate who never studied or listened in class, and who was sure to ask to borrow them even though he hadn’t done the work himself.

That analogy didn’t even apply to Mune. Mune did the work. He just had to do a lot less of it than other people did, and got better results.

He pushed away his own irritation. He was just tired. He had had gotten off work at five, and then spent the two hours and a bit before his friend arrived drawing something that was not his name, and definitely not as comfort-inducing as his futon. He should know better than to be so undisciplined. 

Well. Once the initial blood rush wore off, he would settle down to work on it with the same methodicalness he’d learned to apply to his other projects. Probably. Since he’d met up with Mune again, all the maturity he had thought he gained was being tested to breaking point. 

“So,” said Mune between mouthfuls. “Oreki-kun called me back. It’s brilliant, how much he deduced from a pair of e-mails. But he doesn’t know the whole story yet. A friend of his is digging up some more information.”

Jiro finished chewing before he spoke. “That’s interesting. Is he doing this for free? It sounds like a lot of work.”

“What?”

He wished his voice carried as naturally as his best friend’s did. Enunicating carefully, he repeated, “Are you paying him?”

Mune seemed to find this funny. Jiro wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the way he was yelling it over the din. “No. I think he was curious. I did offer to buy him dinner.”

“Did he say yes?”

Slurp. Slurp. “He wanted two.”

He should really have found somewhere quieter. 

“Hey,” Mune said. “Do you remember in second year, when we went to visit that castle in Okinawa, and you twisted your ankle?”

A chortle. “Don’t look like that!” 

“Don’t laugh when you’re chewing. It’s unhygienic.”

He thought Mune was going to stick his tongue out again. Instead, his friend started to chew more slowly, clearly thinking about something. “Anjou,” he said. “When we were working on A Corpse By Evening, she was carrying around this manga. I think it had a castle on it. I didn’t ask, but the setting might have been Nakijin Castle.”

Jiro stared at him. “You think she might be in Nakijin Prefecture?”

Mune put his chopsticks down, dug in the pockets of the coat he’d draped over his lap for his phone. “It’s a bit of a stretch, but I’ll tell Oreki-kun and see what he thinks.” 

For a moment, he was tempted to ask if Oreki-kun’s judgement was that reliable. Not because he didn’t believe it himself. After all, he’d seen it in action. Mune hadn’t. Or maybe he had. Mune’d said that Oreki-kun’s deductive abilities were brilliant. Perhaps whatever Oreki-kun had told him over the phone was enough to warrant trust.

It made him think of that look on his best friend’s face when he’d allowed him to take his manuscript back with him. Had Mune believed he would say no? There were few people Jiro trusted more.

Time made you forget a lot of things.

After they finished eating, Jiro escaped into the quieter night air with some relief. Mune emerged behind him, asked, “What are we doing now?”

Going home, was his first response. He’d been on his feet since eight thirty that morning. But Mune was waiting, green scarf snug over his mouth and nose, eyes expectant. And Jiro didn’t want to say goodbye that early either. 

Torn between rest and companionship, he gave in and reconciled the two in the most obvious way. “You want to come over? I’ll clean up my stuff if you can boil tea.”

Mune punched him lightly in the shoulder. “You don’t think I’ll ruin it?”

“I believe you can boil tea, Mune.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

Jiro kept things neat because he was not a neat freak, but because he hated tidying up after himself. It was easier to put away one or two things each day than to have make a big project of cleaning every once in a while. 

Once he was done putting away all the papers and the manga he’d been referencing, arranged his tools neatly, he flopped facedown on the tatami mats and wondered if he could just take out his futon now and crawl into it. 

His friend’s socked feet made no sound, so that the first indicator he got of Mune’s return was a socked toe digging into his waist. The sound of cups and teapot laid gently on the table. He moved to get up, but Mune was already lying down to face him, an arm pillowing the side of his head. 

“Are you tired, Sho? I’m sorry. I should have realised.”

He turned to look at Mune too, crossing his own arms to give his head some leverage. There was a normal foot of distance between them, but Jiro’s dreams and waking fantasies fixated his eyes on his best friend’s mouth. 

They were meant to have talked about it the day before yesterday, when he went to get the manuscript. But it’d seemed wrong to bring it up, after the fit he threw. To say, ‘I want to do it again’ when he hadn’t grown up at all, when he still needed to be placated like a child. When he could make Mune look the same way the guy named Takeshi had made him look on the street.

Could he bring it up after the competition? His insides tightened. But what if – what? Would it be more appropriate to do so if Mune won, or if he did? Had he turned his friend into an obstacle, a stepping stone on his way to greater success? Just like a manga character. Up and onwards. Always.

What had he wanted to gain?

What was in it for him if he won?

He knew. The answer was there, in his mind. If he won, it would be proof that hard work and dedication mattered more in the end than talent. Thinking it out like that made him wince. Not to mention that in this scenario, kissing Mune again would be too much like triumph. Or rejection. Kissing a defeated rival, now neutralised. 

What if he lost?

Coldly. He didn’t want to lose.

Then Jiro wanted to bang his head against the mat. Essentially, he’d successfully ended a possible relationship before it even began.

Relationships. Had Takeshi and Mune been in a relationship? He felt an unjustified stab of jealousy at that. Another kind of jealousy. It was different from the freezing darkness he felt about drawing. It flared, then disappeared as quickly as it came, doused by embarassment. 

Not too doused. “Who was that person?” he asked. “The one we met on the street. You called him Takeshi.”

The strange, dark look came back into Mune’s eyes. Just a flash of it before Mune buried his face into his arm, made a sound like a sigh and a protracted question. After a moment, he said to the mat, “Koizumi Takeshi. He’s a Master’s student, studying the Tokugawa period. A fellow member of the Western archery club. We became friends at the beginning of third year. We’re very good friends, actually.”

Jiro knew that. There weren’t that many people Mune called by his first name, or who called him by his. That flash of irritation just now was also unjustified. “You looked like you were fighting though. Is everything okay?”

His friend’s shoulders were tensing. Hunching up in that rare way that meant Mune was going to get angry. Mune didn’t get angry often. His words were acid. “Of course. We fight all the time. Takeshi fights with everyone. He and his ex were always getting into these shouting matches. They still do, even though they tell everyone they’ve broken up.”

Then, abruptly, the shoulders relaxed again. Balloons punctured with needles.

Mune curled into himself, legs drawn up to his ribs. With the acid drained away, his voice had become hollow. “I hope,” he said. “Anjou is in Nakijin Prefecture. I think there’s a village there. She might be living in it now, don’t you think?”

Jiro wanted to brush his friend’s tousled hair out of the way, look at his face. Was it just tired, like his voice? Or was there something else there, something Jiro needed to know? But friends didn’t touch each like that. 

His fingers curled towards each other, before he forcibly flattened them. “It would be nice if she were okay, yes.”

“It would be nice,” Mune repeated. “If she loved Nakijin Castle so much, and she gets to see it everyday, just up on that hill there, wouldn’t it be nice?” And Mune turned his face back to Jiro, smiled. Nothing but a smile. 

“Mune,” he said. There was no end to this sentence. Not one he could voice.

“The castle is so old. Seeing it standing there after so many hundreds of years, it must make everything else seem insignificant. Remind her that a whole world exists outside of her.” 

Shifting over onto his back, his best friend shaded his eyes from the fluorescent lights above with a hand, squinting through the gaps of his fingers. “Let’s go to Okinawa one day,” he said. “Okay?”

Before Jiro could answer, Mune smiled, brought his hand back down to smack himself in the face. “Sorry. That was a stupid question, wasn’t it? You’ll be really busy once you’re serialised. Then you’ll get popular and you have manga assistants that you’re going to work into the ground, because people always forget what it’s like to be at the bottom of the totem pole…”

“You’re getting ahead again. Don’t. And I’ll come with you.” He lifted his head off the mat, propped himself on his elbows so that he could look properly into Mune’s face. “I want to see Nakijin Castle too. This time without a sprained ankle. This time when it’s not raining. I still haven’t gone all the way to the top. You have to go up there with me.”

He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything.

But the night Jiro climbed into Mune’s bedroom and told Mune about his parents, about how he wasn’t going to listen to them, they’d made plans like this too. How Jiro would use the money from his part-time job to rent an apartment. How he would apply to work as a mangaka’s assistant to give him some regular income. How Mune would bring his boxes down from Kamiyama for him so that he could save on the train’s luggage fee.

A plan. A promise. A self-indulgence so that he could go home not so angry, be able to sleep until morning came and it was time to wake up and head to school again. 

But it had come true. 

If there was one thing Jiro had learned, it was that he could make it come true. 

So even though he didn’t know what it was Mune wanted, he said, “We’ll go next month. When the rainy season’s over. For the weekend. Maybe we’ll run into Anjou."

His best friend smiled. The soft smile that was just for his family, just for Jiro. He started to speak. 

A phone beeped. Beeped again.

Jiro watched the skin around Mune’s eyes grow tight. His mouth close down. His breath slow, a steady, thin exhale.

“Is that yours?” Mune asked him. 

Looking around, Jiro spotted his lying on the table, next to the steaming cups of tea and the teapot. A third beep. His phone was still. “No.” Swinging his gaze around to the coats on the hooks next to the door, he pushed himself up onto his knees. “I’ll go get yours. It’s in the pocket…”

“That’s okay,” said Mune, who’d gotten up as well. “I’ll get it. Might be Oreki-kun.”

After he took his phone out of his pocket, he didn’t come back. Stood at the door, his thumb scrolling, tapping on the screen. A laugh. “Oreki-kun says our theory is dismissed. Just because at one point she might have gone to Nakijin doesn’t mean that she’s there now.”

“Logical. Did he take three texts to say that?”

Mune dropped his phone back into his pocket. But he didn’t turn around straight away. He stretched his arms out, up and behind his head, cricked his neck. “Ah,” he said. “I’m tired.”

Tired. Tired could explain the hollowness in his tone, Jiro guessed. That was what Matsumoto-san, Yujiro-san sounded like after a long day too. What he must sound like himself. 

“No,” Mune said. 

“The texts.” His best friend was looking back at him now. Tipped his head at Jiro in mock exasperation. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered. The other texts were from a friend. I just remembered. It’s her birthday today.”

He glared. Shifted his glasses further up his nose. “Why didn’t you wish her then?”

“I don’t think she’d notice. She’s been texting me all day.”

“What do you mean she wouldn’t notice? She’s apparently been texting you all day.”

There was a considering look on Mune’s face. The same look he directed at Maths questions and at Jiro during the cultural festival, at the Magic Club’s showing, standing together and reading the Wall Newspaper Club’s special morning post, just talking in the executive committee’s classroom.

Mune said, “She’s like that sometimes. She might be a bit drunk. I think the tea’s too thick now. Should I take the teabag out?”

Jiro turned his gaze away. Got up. “Sure. I’ll get us some grapes.”

He closed the kitchen door behind him. It was just grapes. Closing the door was unnecessary. Suspicious. But he was angry. He needed to calm down, here in the dark, away from Muneyoshi.

Because his best friend had looked at him at that moment and decided he didn’t deserve to know the truth.


	7. Chapter 7

The book met with Hotaro’s face on the grassy incline outside Tamagawa’s campus. It was a small book, encased in a fabric cover that Satoshi had embroided with sunflowers, his favourite flower because it was so eye-catching, so demanding on one’s attention. He doubted it’d hurt. But after Hotaro peeled it off, he rubbed his nose anyway, a dull glare aimed at Satoshi. 

Satoshi was standing with his hands on his hips, leaned over so that he was a shadow over Hotaro’s face. Like this, he thought suddenly, he could just sink to his knees, kiss his friend on the mouth. It would be easy. It would be natural. Hotaro had already told him he liked him. ‘I like you’, he’d said, in that low, neutral voice of his. 

Shock. Then elation. Then rage. Or hopelessness. Weren’t they the same? People became angry only for two reasons. A wrong had been committed. Or a right couldn’t be made. Satoshi had been angry because of both. People became angry because there were things they had no power to change.

Hotaro was sitting up. “You’re done?”

“Quick, aren’t I?”

The pages flicked by, one after the other. “Summary.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted, then plopped down next to his friend, got to business. “So, the first place I checked was ‘Hello Page’.”

At Hotaro’s look, he shrugged. “Unlikely, I know. If she doesn’t want to be found, why would she have herself listed there? The same applies to the residential registry, and since household registration is largely paper-based, it’s not very useful for us. But it was worth a go. I also searched the Internet again just in case, taking in account any threads related to Nakijin Prefecture, Nakijin Village and Nakijin Castle. But there’s nothing there that might point to Anjou-san in particular.”

Then he lifted a finger. “But I did manage to contact Anjou-san’s classmates in Australia. I looked up her school website and found an article praising certain students in her year for their grades in the High School Certificate exams, typed those names into Google, and voila! Alumni Facebook page. Of course, once you take out those people who wouldn’t reply to a query from a stranger, those who didn’t know her or were barely acquainted with her, then we come down to only one person. Howell-san.”

“She only had one friend?”

Satoshi eyed him. “How many friends do you have, Hotaro?”

He lowered his gaze to the notebook in front of him. Looked up again. “But that’s me. Making friends wastes energy. Considering how much time must have gone into writing two manga plots, I doubt that applies to Anjou-san.”

On the ball as always, even when he was being teased. “You’re right. Anjou-san’s reasons were different. According to Howell-san, her English never really improved, and she didn’t much like the heat, so when her yearmates wanted to go surfing or something, you know, living next to the Great Barrier Reef and all, she didn’t join in. She also studied a lot, so she was rarely seen outside the library. Howell-san and Anjou-san became friends because Howell-san was a volunteer librarian.”

Hotaro huddled into his trenchcoat. Let go of Satoshi’s notebook to stick his hands back into his pockets. It was a cold day, cold enough that there were predictions of snow in the coming week. “That makes sense.”

“What makes sense?”

“Her father sounded strict. Parental pressure, maybe.”

Hotaro had always been good at picking up emotions, even if his ability to manipulate them was inconstant. Satoshi continued. “When I told Howell-san that Anjou-san had disappeared, and if she could remember Anjou-san doing or saying anything strange before she left Australia, she had to think for a long time. Then she told me that once in the library, she saw Anjou-san looking at a list of villages in Japan on Wikipedia. She remembered it because she’d thought it was a strange thing to look up.”

“Did she look at any particular village?”

Satoshi cupped his hands before his face, blew on them. His breath misted on his gloves, made them warm, almost damp. Back in Kamiyama, if he and Hotaro were sitting outside like this, they would be sitting in snow, snow all around them. A white and only very temporarily silent world. Because Mayaka and Chii-chan would be there too, of course. And the four of them never did anything too quiet. 

“That would be too easy, Hotaro. And remember that Anjou-san was working at the time. She wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to see. Not to mention that as she doesn’t speak Japanese, the names would’ve been difficult to remember.”

“Did she remember any details?”

He laughed. “I’m getting there. She did ask Anjou-san why she was looking that up, and Anjou-san said she’d always wanted to visit a small place, and that did she know some of these villages had only seven thousand inhabitants? Everyone must know everyone. Anjou-san said something like that.”

Hotaro frowned. “That’s a shaky criterion to apply to any search. She could have been randomly putting out a fact to distract Howell-san.”

“Right?” Satoshi held his hands out, palm out. “Sorry. That’s all I could find out. If you can take that and see what you come up with.”

Fingers were already twisting in dark hair. “No, that’s a lot. Thanks.”

Watching him think, Satoshi almost didn’t want to move on to the next task at hand. He could just get up, walk away. He’d never liked to win anyway. Did it matter so much, if he never proved to Hotaro that the person he liked was Chii-chan? 

This was what was natural. Comfortable. Him as the database, Hotaro as the detective. Demoralising, yes, but so was being on opposite sides. What was more was that being on opposite sides, was painful.

He didn’t like pain any more than the next person.

But he was angry. Still so angry. And Satoshi was petty. What he had no power to change, he broke. 

“You know,” he said. “Chii-chan and Yamashita-kun broke up.”

Hotaro’s fingers dropped from his hair. His head came up. 

“I heard it was amicable. Neither of them too torn up about it. Chii-chan says they both saw it coming for a while. It was too difficult to meet up all the time, when she was at Waseda and he was at the other end of Tokyo. When Yamashita-kun told her he was going overseas on an exchange program, they decided to make it official.”

He wondered what Hotaro was thinking. Which made him say, “So that’s why she said that.”

Satoshi scrambled to his feet. “What? So you’ve been in touch. She didn’t tell you?”

“It didn’t come up.” Still speaking more to himself.

Looking down at his best friend once more, a pale shadow over Hotaro’s head, he said, “Go to Disneyland with me this weekend. Hotaro.”

There was no snow here in Tokyo. They were on a grassy incline with no trees in sight, just steel and glass buildings, a courtyard across which students walked, their voices a constant buzz in the background, the sky blue and empty of anything, sun or moon. It was just the weather, sharp and bitter enough that with the skin of his face exposed like it inevitably was, Satoshi couldn’t help but know it was winter. 

Just this one detail. And the whole setting changed.

He tipped his head to one side, let his eyes slide closed and grinned. “It’ll be a date.”

 

Muneyoshi’s bedroom looked out onto the street. The building was situated a little back from the pavement, but the noise was interminable for someone who’d spent his life in a small mountain town. He’d adapted, naturally. Made little changes. Listening to music on his headphones when he studied, where before he used to listen to silence and in the spring, birds chirping in the trees outside his house. Sleeping with the covers over his head until he fell asleep, and the noise ceased to matter. Keeping the blinds closed so that he wasn’t tempted to look outside at an everchanging scene instead of concentrating on whatever he was doing. 

He’d gotten so used to sinking into his own world as he worked that Konno had to thump on his door three times before he heard him. He muted the music on his laptop. “It’s open,” he called.

Konno poked his head in. His flatmate was a quiet person, obssessed with Pokémon and Final Fantasy, and always sleepy-looking. Muneyoshi didn’t think it was fair for people to blame it on the fact that he was a med student. It wasn’t the subject’s fault Konno spent his nights gaming. “Did you hear anything just now?”

He pulled off his earphones. “You knocking?”

A slow blink. “Are you going out later?”

Glancing down at the paper on his desk, he sighed. “No, I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere for a while.”

“So you’re definitely not going out for, like, the next ten minutes.”

“I’m not going out to buy Pocky for you, Konno. If you wanted some, you should’ve asked when I bought groceries yesterday. And anyway, aren’t you free now? I thought you finished that essay.”

Another blink. “Okay.” The door slammed shut.

Weird. But Konno was usually weird, so Muneyoshi ignored it, slipped his headphones back on. He had bigger things to be worried about. Namely, the blank page in front of him. 

Drawing wasn’t difficult. 

Thinking like this, being able to think like this, was what made Sho resent him so much. But the truth was that was how Muneyoshi felt most of the time. It meant that when he was stumped, he was really stumped. And he didn’t know why.

It wasn’t because he didn’t have ideas. There were plenty knocking about up there. None of them felt right, that was all. None of them stood out. The most interesting thing right now was a blank opening. Completely silent. Just a footstep in a corridor, an echo conveyed in three trapezoidal panels. 

But would that be too boring? Would it set the wrong tone? Kudryavka’s Order had a more whimsical feel to it than A Corpse By Evening. It also made character design a problem. He’d gone with whatever first came to mind with A Corpse By Evening, but he didn’t know if he should do the same thing this time. Had Anjou wanted something more whimsical for her characters too?

He turned his hand over, opened his fingers and let the pencil he’d been holding roll off and onto the desk. Were these things easier for Sho, who’d drawn so many different manuscripts, who had so much more experience?

Did he just lack experience? Or was there something else holding him back?

Muneyoshi had kissed girls before. He knew what performance anxiety felt like. The only way to get over it was to push past it. 

He picked up his pencil again, began to draw. Barely a line in, he gave up. Tore his headphones off for the second time. The sudden silence resonated. Rippling, rippling outwards like the vibrations of a bell already clanged. 

Maybe he would go buy that Pocky for Konno after all.

Outside, the apartment was quiet. His flatmate had left the Playstation running, his Final Fantasy character paused in the middle of running somewhere. The lights were all switched on. Sho would’ve been appalled.

“Konno?” he called. Knocked on his bedroom door. No answer. He tried the knob. It turned. But there was no one inside. Had Konno gone to buy the Pocky himself?

Grabbing his coat off its peg, the keys from its bowl – the idiot had forgotten his keys too, what the hell – he opened the door. And nearly got a faceful of brown hair. He shot out a hand, stopped Konno from stumbling back into him. “Hey, what…”

“There you are,” Takeshi said. Scowling. Even scowling, he looked good. Those curls. That jaw. Those blue eyes. It made Muneyoshi want to laugh. 

Konno turned to him, tone flat and accusing. “You said you weren’t going out.”

“You have a guard dog now, Muneyoshi?”

Ah. So that was what Konno had been doing. How sweet, he wanted to think, but how unnecessary. But he wished that his flatmate had been more successful. 

Konno said, “He doesn’t have to talk to you if he doesn’t want to.”

A hand dragged through black curls. Takeshi rolled his eyes. But his voice came out strained, almost trembling. Had Kaede texted him too, while she was drunk? Was this why he was so worked up? “Like I said, I’m not the bad guy here. You don’t even know what happened. Why are you automatically on his side? We’re adults. We should talk like adults. I wouldn’t even be here if,” his gaze snapped to Muneyoshi. “you answered your phone.”

Muneyoshi wanted to bury his face in his coat. The cold in the corridor was seeping into his skin. He put it on instead, first one arm then the other. Takeshi was right. Somehow, this had become about Muneyoshi again. It wasn’t about him. He slipped his keys into his coat pocket. Said to Konno, “Thanks, and sorry about this. Takeshi and I will talk outside.”

Konno didn’t look impressed. But he shrugged. Shut the door behind him. 

Maybe he should have put on a sweater too. He started down the corridor. Takeshi caught up to him. Glanced at Muneyoshi, but said nothing. For all his insistence on talking, he didn’t seem too fussed about getting started.

Muneyoshi held up that bit of resentment, and cleanly, methodically shredded it. The less he felt while they did this, the better. The less he would have to turn it over and over in his head when it was done. He was done with this. He was so done with this. 

He didn’t want to do this at all. 

And even that was a self-absorbed, self-pitying thought.

On the ground of the apartment, in the lobby, there was a drinks dispenser. Muneyoshi bought them both drinks with the coins he had left in his pocket. Red bean soup, because it was cold outside. Then he directed Takeshi through the emergency exit door next to the lift. In a high-rise like this, no one used the stairs. Here, no one would disturb them. The creak of the heavy door, which swung shut on its own, echoed in the space. 

He sat down on the steps, held Takeshi’s drink out to him.

After a moment, Takeshi took it. Sat down on the same step. There was four feet of space between them. The drink was warm in Muneyoshi’s hand, droplets of moisture forming between his skin and the can. 

This wasn’t so awkward. Of course it wasn’t. Being with Takeshi had never been a chore in itself. Just the roller coaster of teenage angst it’d turned into. He clicked the tab off, took a sip and then looked at his friend. “What did Kaede say?”

Takeshi dropped his head. “I’ve tried, but. We haven’t talked.”

Leaning back, arm propped on the step behind him, he asked, “Not even right after?” 

“Have you?”

Right after, he’d walked to Kaede’s apartment, knocked on the door. She lived alone, so there was no flatmate to come and tell him to go away. Kaede opened the door herself. Stood there, in the dark, her mascara running, her face red. 

Muneyoshi didn’t know what he’d looked like. Just that he was still winded after running here from the subway station. That he was scared. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

Kaede had a musical voice. She used to sing in her school choir. Still sang as much as she could, to songs on her i-Pod, to music she just remembered, just like that, in her head, to the jingle of Muneyoshi’s ringtone. Now, she used that musicality to hit a fine note of sarcasm. “You didn’t know what? That I loved him? How did that manage to escape your attention? When I told you back who knows when, or when I confessed, or when…”

Her voice was rising to a screaming pitch. 

“You broke up!” He was yelling too. Shouting to drown her out. His voice reverberated in the ensuing silence. Silence tense and quivering as a clanged bell. 

To Takeshi he said, “The two of you did break up, right? I didn’t get that part wrong.”

There was silence here too.

He flicked his eyes to the ceiling, the slant upwards of the staircase above. “Takeshi.”

“We did break up.”

The feelings were coming back. There were too many of them. Holding them all inside him made his joints ache. “It was the timing, then.”

Takeshi rubbed at his face. “Of course it was. You know that. You knew that.”

“Then,” his voice was too harsh. “What did you want to discuss?”

A noise of sheer frustration. “I don’t know! I just want to fix it. I want us to be okay. I want Kaede to talk to me, I want to tell her she’s being bloody unfair about this for fuck’s sake, I want…”

“We are okay.”

He dropped his gaze back down, caught Takeshi’s. Repeated, “We are okay.”

Hope, tentative, softened his friend’s mouth. Then trouble crept up behind it. Takeshi spoke gently, the way he’d spoken when they met for the first time. Polite, quiet. He’d reminded Muneyoshi of Sho, except Sho only gave off the appearance of reticence, and Takeshi was the same inside as he was outside. “I can’t just take that from you.”

Muneyoshi put his can down. The sound of the aluminium on the step wasn’t loud, but final. He’d done this in meetings all the time, when everyone was rushing around being too excited. This was what authority came down to. The ability to centre people. To choose what they focused on. “We’re okay, Takeshi. Just take it as is. As for Kaede, there’s a simple solution.”

Drawn eyebrows. A held breath. Doubt and entrustment at one and the same time. 

Perhaps that was what allowed him to fold his arms on top of his knees, lean across the space between them, and without fuss, without feeling, solve everything.


	8. Chapter 8

Because Satoshi was the type of person who had an itinerary for the Cultural Festival, Hotaro found himself lining up to buy tickets at the entrance to Disneyland forty-five minutes before the theme park was due to open. This did mean that he was near the front of the line. But it also meant that he was forty-five minutes early. And Satoshi was nowhere to be seen. 

Hotaro’s hands were sweaty in his gloves. He’d been nervous since he woke up at half six. And for the first time he could remember, he had put on the first thing in his wardrobe, then taken it off and put on something else. It wasn’t as if he’d ransacked his cupboard, or even looked at himself in the mirror, but there was a rose-coloured feel to it that made him want to rebel. Nervousness didn’t suit him. It involved too much internal activity. He felt as if he’d been flayed open. 

This was Satoshi. They hung out together all the time. Satoshi had just put a different name to it today. Hotaro peeled off his gloves. Tucked them into his coat pocket. The air was ice on his sweat. 

At exactly nine, the line edged forward. The gates were open. Where was Satoshi?

“Oreki-san!”

He swung his head to the side. People. Lines of people. 

“Oreki-san!”

To the other side. More people.

“Oreki-san.” Right in his ear. He jumped. Chitanda smiled up at him. Her white fur coat accentuated the pale glow of her skin. The purple earmuffs, her eyes. And her hair, glossy black, tumbled loose as always down her back, over the delicate shells of her ears. The teenage boys behind him were staring. 

Hotaro understood instantly.

It was like Satoshi, to decide not to solve the mystery and make the reality instead.

Chitanda’s phone rang. She dug into her purse for it. “Oh,” she said, her eyes widening. She held it to her ear. “Fukube-san?”

Dismay softened her voice. “That’s awful, Fukube-san. And you were looking forward to it too. Yes. Yes. Very well. I’ll pass you to him now. Oreki-san.”

He looked at the phone, and then at Chitanda. Who tilted her head, concerned. His heartbeat was sluggish. That was why he wasn’t taking it from her straight away, like a normal person would. His heart beat slowly, wetly. It hurt. 

“Oreki-san?”

He took her phone. 

“Hotaro.”

Every flayed nerve ending sparked, coalesced into a single point of rage. “Satoshi.”

His friend’s voice was cool. “Chii-chan moved her commitments around to make it today, so I hope you make it worth her while. There’s a map of Disneyland in your bag. All the romantic attractions are highlighted in pink.”

He pressed a hand over his eyes. The skin was warm. 

In front of them, the line was still moving. Chitanda took his arm, her gloved hand small in the crook of his elbow, and edged them forward too. There were things he wanted to say to Satoshi. But not in front of Chitanda. He didn’t want her to have to hear them. It came to him, then. A code. 

“Satoshi,” he said. “Do you remember the tarot cards?”

“Tarot cards,” his friend repeated. Then laughed. “First year, right? I see. So you did understand it. The code.” A pause. “Ah, I see. Are you trying to say that I’m controlling you? Hotaro.”

His throat hurt. 

Gently. “That’s not fair. This was a competition. I was only trying to win in my way.”

That was what Irisu-senpai had said too. She was doing only what she had to do. She couldn’t fail here.

“Is that all?” Zip, zip cheer. “Pass me back to Chii-chan, please.”

He dropped the phone from his ear, held it out. Chitanda took it. She and Satoshi exchanged a few more pleasantries. She asked him to take care. And then ended the call. Her other hand, now free, came to rest on his elbow too. “Oreki-san? Are you all right? You don’t feel ill too, do you?”

Chitanda had had to go out of her way to make it today. He wouldn’t drag her further into this mess with Satoshi than he had to. “No,” he said. “What do you want to go and see first?”

They passed through the pale green arches and onto Main Street. 

Even at nine in the morning, Disneyland was packed. Students in their black or blue uniforms gathered just outside the ticket entrance, waiting for their teachers to finish counting them, separate them into their groups and release them. Chitanda got a map at the ticket counter, shook it open, and pointed out a few attractions she was interested in. Hotaro left Satoshi’s map in his bag.

“Monster’s Inc. Ride and Go Seek,” she said. “If you have no objections, Oreki-san, would you like to go here first? Fukube-san mentioned that it was a very popular and interesting ride.”

Of course Satoshi would cover his bases. “Did he recommend anything else?”

“A few. He was very enthusiastic about coming today.”

“Ah.”

The map crackled as she folded it. “Oreki-san,” she said. “While we walk to the ride, would it be all right for you to fill me in on what has happened in your competition with Fukube-san?”

When she turned right into a side street, he did too. Instinctively. “Sure. But why do you ask?”

She smiled. “You don’t look very happy today, that’s all.”

He scratched the back of his neck, turned his head away from her. A bunch of schoolkids ran past, chattering excitedly. He hoped they weren’t going to the same ride. Their piercing screams would give him a headache. Theme parks weren’t his scene. All the people. Lining up. The hot sun, or in some cases, the rain. “I don’t look happy generally.”

Chitanda interlocked her hands behind her. Said, “That’s not true, Oreki-san. You are happy often. Inside.”

“Inside,” he muttered. Then stiffened when she giggled.

The kids appeared to be going in the same direction. Resigned, he said, “We’ve been busy with another mystery, so there’s not been much progress.”

Another mystery was the right, or the wrong thing to say. Depending on how you looked at it. Chitanda’s eyes were shining. “What mystery?”

He told her. By the time he finished, they were at the end of a long line of people that had somehow managed to bypass them on the way here. At least they joined the queue before it’d snaked outside the waiting area and into the street. 

“I’m curious,” Chitanda declared. 

He stuck his hands into his pockets. “What about, exactly?”

At the front, little kids were climbing into blue cars with their parents. A tinny announcement started over the speaker, making it difficult to hear Chitanda’s soft, polite voice. He leaned closer to her, her words a breath in his ear. She smelt of lavender and grass. Old, vast homes in a small mountain town. Classrooms in the sun, empty but for the two of them. Running footsteps in the corridor outside, and the breath before the door was slammed sideways to admit loud voices, laughter.

He had never liked Chitanda because she made his life rose-coloured. Kamiyama High School, with more than fifty-one different organisations and a student body of at least a thousand, had more than enough rose in it to suffocate. Satoshi was rose incarnate, in colour, in personality, even in the whimsy of his particular problems. Ibara threw herself into rose coloured events with determined fervour. 

What Chitanda gave him was direction. 

“What kind of person is Anjou-san?” she asked now. “Why would she want to run away and where would she want to go?”

He stepped back into his own space. Edged forward as the queue edged forward. Satoshi’s notebook was in his bag. There was also a pen tucked into an outside pocket. He got both out. 

Chitanda’s hair slipped over her ears as she leaned in for a better look. 

Satoshi had written down the main points of his conversation with Howell-san. Clicking the pen on, Hotaro circled the important ones.

Poor English. Dislike of heat. Studied a lot. List of villages. Seven thousand.

“Seven thousand?” Chitanda read aloud. “But Kamiyama has seven thousand inhabitants. Surely she wouldn’t find that interesting enough to comment on.”

“Ah,” Hotaro said, clicking the pen off. “When Satoshi mentioned it, I dismissed it as a random fact to distract Howell-san. But if we take into account the other things that Howell-san mentioned about Anjou-san, it’s not random. It’s symptomatic.”

“Symptomatic?”

It was nearly their turn. He returned both notebook and pen to his bag.

“What impression does Anjou-san give you?”

Chitanda touched her chin with a fist, fine eyebrows drawing together. “Ah.” She lifted a finger. “She doesn’t seem like she adjusted very well to her surroundings in Australia, does she? She must have been lonely.”

He tucked his hands into his pockets. The ache he’d felt at the entrance was almost gone. Weighed under by a growing calm. It would come back later, when his quiet satisfaction wore off. “Where do you think a person like Anjou-san would go if she wanted to run away long term?”

They were at the front of the queue now. As the next blue car drew up, and they were allowed through to get onto it, the answer came to Chitanda. She spun around to look at him. “Oreki-san,” she said. “I think, I think Anjou-san would want to live somewhere very much like home.”

 

“Who’s the boy?”

Jiro lifted another two water bottles from the box, added them to the neat row he’d made. His hands were freezing from the cool air of the refrigerated shelves, and Matsumoto-san had the bitter smell of cigarettes on her breath. He kept the irritation out of his voice. “What boy?”

Thick hands shoved a cigarette pack back into her dark blue apron pocket. “The one who’s been shooting looks at you for the past five minutes.”

He sighed. “Are you sure you aren’t imagining things? Smoking can induce hallucinations, I’ve heard.”

“You made that up. And I’m not imagining things. Tall, good-looking, idol hair. Sound like someone you know?”

“That’s the most unhelpful description I have…” He turned around. 

Mune, who was in the middle of shooting a look at him over a magazine, paused. Then smiled.

“You do know him,” Matsumoto-san said. “Well, you’re off after you’re done with those, aren’t you? Walk the boy home. I know I would. I would like to do a lot of things to him. If he were old enough to drink.”

Jiro didn’t know what to say to that. Early on, when the one then the other had realised that he didn’t like to swear, Matsumoto-san and Yujiro-san’s boyfriend seemed to have taken to saying shocking things just to get a reaction out of him. He hoped they never met Mune. His best friend might not live through the encounter.

“He is old enough to drink,” Jiro told her. Then got up, pulling his apron off his head. “Thanks. Say hello to Natsu-chan for me.”

“Don’t flirt with my little girl when your boyfriend’s here.”

Mune must have heard ‘boyfriend’. Matsumoto-san was saying it loud enough. He ducked his head behind his magazine. Didn’t look up again until Jiro was right in front of him. And then the tips of his ears were red. 

“Hey,” Jiro said. “How did you find this place?”

“You said you worked nearby, so I walked in a random direction from your house and found this place. Are you off now?”

“Yeah. Just wait a minute. I’ll get my coat.”

At five p.m. it was already dark out. The gloomiest part of winter. And there was no snow to trap some of the daylight, keep it there once the sun had set. Mune wasn’t wearing his favourite green scarf today. He wasn’t wearing a scarf at all, and seemed to be keeping his head low because of it, tilted towards the ground. He didn’t have a cap either. Jiro should have realised that earlier. He wouldn’t have been able to note the shade of his best friend’s ears if there had been a cap.

Mune was a Kamiyama kid. It wasn’t like he didn’t know to dress warmly. 

“Well?” he asked. “Did you want something?”

His friend glanced at him. Tugged up his coat collar, a smile at the edge of his mouth. “No, nothing in particular. I was just walking back to my apartment, and I thought, Sho’s going to be off work soon, maybe we could eat dinner together, more or less.”

Under the street lamps, their shadows merged into one. At this hour, even though they weren’t next to a highway, the road was choked with cars. It was weird, looking into those lighted windows and seeing people doing normal things, talking on phones, bopping their heads to music. Jiro didn’t look into any one car for too long. People didn’t take kindly to strangers staring. 

Walking next to Mune like this, he had the sudden feeling that he couldn’t look too long at his friend either. That if he did, Mune’s face would go dark again and Jiro would be alone with their footsteps and the winter air. 

Boyfriend, Matsumoto-san had said. 

The truth was, he wouldn’t mind. He didn’t think he would’ve minded back in high school either, although it’d never really crossed his mind. Too much trying not to think about his best friend in a sexual way because it was embarassing, too much worrying about exams, too much resentment building up at everyone; his parents, Mune. Sometimes, he looked back at high school and it was difficult to remember the good parts.

He wondered if years later, he would look back at himself walking here, and remember only this too. The last cough of a friendship already faded. The crack as the thin line descended to the very edge of the ice, and black water opened up between the pieces that floated away.

Mune reached out, tugged on his arm. “You’re walking too close to the kerb, Sho.”

“Sorry.”

Silence descended again. 

Where had all the small talk gone?

In nearly three years, where had it gone, when he could have just picked up a phone and texted Mune, something inane, unimportant. Have you eaten? How were your exams? Did you know I failed to get shorlisted for the Tezuka again? Where had it gone, when Mune could have turned up at his apartment as casually as he had today, could have called him to wish him ‘happy birthday’ like he hadn’t wished his friend that night? 

At the reunion, why had Mune offered to walk him back? Why had Sho asked him to come home with him? Why had they talked for so long. Why did they kiss?

He came to a stop. The cars crawled past, light trapped behind their windows. When his friend turned around, sensing that Sho was no longer beside him, the street lamps shone onto his features, the light motes thick over his hair. 

“Mune,” he said. “Why are you here?”

A pause. The slight crease of his eyebrows, the flash of despair. “I didn’t think too hard about it.”

He’d never let his best friend get away with anything. But out of a half-conscious insecurity, a recognition that what could be broken once was more easily, more thoroughly broken the second time, he had let their truce go on for too long. 

With his resentment, he’d helped Mune change the question.

It was his responsibility to change it back. 

“You’re not dressed to come this far out, so yeah, I can see you weren’t thinking. I want to know why. What aren’t you thinking about, Mune?”

A smile. “That’s a weird way to put it, Sho.”

He was angry. He was cold. There was no relief to the yellow light, the heavy darkness, the alien cars stuck wading along beside them. “You used to tell me when you were worried about something.”

Mune looked away, across the cars to where a bridge rose above the road, linking up to the highway. Beneath the bridge was a strip of grass. The government greenery campaign had planted a couple of hydrangea bushes there, and roses along the side. Jiro knew this because he’d been here in the spring. Now, in the darkness and in the winter, there were just bare branches. 

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” Mune said at last, still not looking at him. “It’s just that I don’t like talking about it. It’s complicated, and messy. One thing after another, for months, and I…” he sighed. “I was tired of it.”

He turned back now, met Jiro’s gaze. In the glare of lamplight, his eyes were dark. “I’m sorry, Sho. If I made you think that I didn’t trust you, or that I didn’t think we were friends like that anymore. I’ve made you worry, haven’t I?”

When they were seventeen, someone had confessed to Mune for the first time. Girls looked at him a lot, but it wasn’t like in shojo manga, where everyone had the courage to hand out chocolates to boys, write sweet letters doused in perfume to shove into shoe lockers. They looked, and they whispered, but to Mune, they never said a word.

This girl though. She was a first year, bespectacled, light hair in a single plait down her back. A member of the executive committee, although she rarely spoke. The only reason Jiro knew her name was because he’d made it a point to know everyone’s names. Aizawa Aiko. 

After the executive meeting on Valentine’s Day, she stayed behind, her friends jostling her, other people looking askance. Jiro, picking up the building panic in her eyes, the way she clutched her schoolbag like there was something precious inside it, picked up his books and left as well. Mune, who looked like he was going to panic himself, Jiro shoved back into his seat.

The next day, Aizawa didn’t come to the meeting. The day after, when he and Mune saw her in the corridor, Mune stared very hard in the other direction, which was very obviously the wall, and Aizawa hurried past, face red like she was about to cry.

On the third day, when Aizawa didn’t turn up again, Jiro decided enough was enough. He’d stopped Mune at the junction between their houses and said, “What did you do?”

His best friend turned white. “Nothing.”

“She was confessing to you, right? What did you say to her?”

A pause. A long pause. And then, words like a surging waterfall, “I didn’t know what to say! She was just standing there, holding chocolates, and saying she liked me, and I…uh…I...”

“Mune.”

“I said sorry.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Was that it?”

“I also said other things. I was nervous, okay? And it kind of all came out…”

“What did you say?”

Eyes flicked away, then back, guilty. The rest came out flat and unstoppable as a conveyor belt in a factory. “I might have said that I couldn’t like her because I didn’t know her name, or who she was, because it wasn’t like she spoke in meetings.”

The annoying thing about glasses was that Jiro couldn’t slap himself properly. 

“I’m sorry, Sho.”

“You’re apologising to her tomorrow. You should’ve done it earlier!”

Mune had scratched the back of his neck, sheepish. “I didn’t know what to say.”

“Then you should’ve told me earlier.”

A hung head. “I didn’t know what to say to you either.”

He let this stand for a moment. Then he said, “How did you win the election again?”

Jiro used to drag things out of Mune all the time. And Mune used to drag things out of him. Just like Mune listened to him rant about his parents and endured his bouts of unreasonable jealousy, and he helped Mune think through the problems he didn’t like to admit he had and pushed him when he would have been happy to float.

It was what they did for each other. 

Except this time, Jiro hadn’t done it for Mune. He’d done it for himself. Because he was angry. Afraid. 

And this time, his best friend wasn’t telling him because he wanted to, or needed to. He was telling him because it was what he’d determined Jiro was owed. 

“At the beginning of third year,” Mune said. “I met Koizumi Takeshi at Western archery club. I had a crush on him. The thing was, I had another friend called Tachibana Kaede. And Kaede fell in love with him. That was how it started.”


	9. Chapter 9

After they carried out the plan, Muneyoshi was supposed to have gone back to his apartment. Out of the sports ground, across campus, onto the street, and past a few pedestrian lights; the distance wasn’t such that he needed a scarf or a hat. 

And so when he met Kaede at the archery hall, the keys he’d borrowed from the captain jangling in his pocket, he was wearing only his coat and gloves. No practice for him today. He was too anxious. So, just waiting for the two hours after he’d taken the keys from Hashimoto and promised to lock up. Toudai’s sports facilities closed at seven on Sunday nights, but by four thirty, the archery hall and the surrounding football and baseball pitches were empty. Sitting where he was on a bench outside the hall, he could see the darkness, hear the quiet.

Kaede’s eyes flicked to the glass doors of the hall first. “You’re wasting electricity.”

He stood up. “Let’s go inside.”

Her gaze was flat. “Why?”

“I’m cold.”

Their shoes squeaked on the floor. Polished brown wood. The Western archery hall was longer than it was wide. Considering how fast the club had been growing, it was always too crowded, sometimes suffocating. Today, the space tumbled before them, onwards and onwards to the bare wall. The targets had been put away, behind a set of blue doors on their right. 

He walked right up to the doors, pulled them open. As he had predicted, Kaede, ever curious, followed him. 

She had come far enough. He walked past her, back to the entrance. This time, more suspicious, a little irritated, she stayed where she was in the centre of the range. Twisting on her feet to face him, she asked, “What are you doing, Muneyoshi?” 

His task was done. But there was something that he wanted to know. “Why did you agree to talk to me?”

Kaede’s frown died a brief death, then returned in full force. She turned her glare away from him, off to the far wall, locked her hands behind her in that defensive way she had. “Those texts. I was drunk.”

Muneyoshi breathed in, out. Then smiled. “Really. I didn’t even read them.”

Her gaze snapped back to him. Her voice was cautious. “You didn’t?”

“No, I ignored them.” Then, backing all the way out the entrance, he said, “Well. You two enjoy your talk. I’ll be back when you’re done.”

“Enjoy our…”

Takeshi stepped out of the blue doors. Kaede’s screaming could be heard perfectly clearly through the glass as he locked up, and as he walked up the pathway she’d come down, but as soon as he broke clear of the baseball pitch, it was quiet again. Just as he had expected. 

Easy. Simple. The best solutions often were. Perhaps they should’ve done this earlier. Talked like Takeshi insisted. Problems couldn’t be solved by hiding. It was common sense. It was common sense, so why had he let himself off the hook for so long?

Out of the sports ground, across campus, onto the street, and past a few pedestrian lights; the distance wasn’t such that the cold was starting to bite.

He’d told Kaede that he would come and get them when they were done. But it was more like he would come and get them in two hours, once Kaede’s attempts to call him and yell at him had all gone to voicemail, she and Takeshi’d gotten their opportunity to talk, and Muneyoshi turned on his phone again. 

He had two uninterrupted hours of time. From here, the glass doors of his apartment building were visible. It would be warm inside. He could stop at the drinks dispenser on the way, buy red bean soup. If he didn’t feel like studying, he could get Konno to play some Final Fantasy with him. There was Kudryavka’s Order to start on too. Sho had never said their competition had a deadline. But a grand total of nothing seemed like too little. 

Couldn’t he do anything without screwing up?

Couldn’t he do anything without distorting it; inserting himself into the equation so that it became impossible to keep his head, make the right decisions?

He was tired of thinking about himself. 

He didn’t know how to stop.

When he turned around, headed to the subway station, it was four thirty-five p.m. 

Now, Muneyoshi stood opposite his best friend, whose face was closed, whose fists bulged in his coat pockets, and realised that once again, he’d done something wrong. By running away to Sho, by using him to hide, as if Sho were a little house he could put into his pocket the way he used to hide his sister’s doll furnishings when he was mad at her, he’d hurt him. 

So he tried to rectify it. 

“At the beginning of third year,” he said. “I met Koizumi Takeshi at Western archery club. I had a crush on him. The thing was, I had another friend called Tachibana Kaede. And Kaede fell in love with him. That was how it started.”

Did Sho think it was ridiculous too? Was that why he exhaled so slowly, measuredly, why his eyes were so distant behind his glasses? Did he think it was a stupid thing to have kept from him? A stupid thing to have gotten into the first place? Or was he thinking something else, something Muneyoshi just couldn’t think of himself?

“Kaede and I realised that we both liked him.”

On Valentine’s Day, when she’d been tense all practice, and he teased her about whether she was going to give someone here chocolates. She’d nearly bitten his head off. And then because he was her friend and she needed him to shut up, her words exactly, she’d told him who the recipient was.

Thinking back now, it was funny. It made him want to laugh.

Kaede didn’t end up giving Takeshi the chocolates. Muneyoshi had acted too suspiciously for that, snapping at her like a sullen, wronged child. 

“So,” he said. “We decided to make it fair. We would both confess to him. And whoever he accepted, there would be no hard feelings on either side. We rolled a dice to decide who went first. I went first.”

Aizawa Aiko. If he hadn’t remembered her name before, it was burned into his memory now. He’d finally understood how she felt, the day he so badly botched it up for the both of them. It hadn’t been like that with Takeshi. Takeshi let him down the way people were supposed to. Gently. Respectfully.

He could still remember lying in his room aftewards, the lights off, the afternoon sun trickling through the blinds. Missing dinner. Snapping at Konno when he came to ask if he was okay. Immature.

In the morning, Kaede texted him to tell him they were going out.

That should have been the end of it. 

Sho dropped his head. Took his gloved hands out of his pockets.

Muneyoshi said, “Takeshi rejected…”

A fist bumped against his head as Sho walked past. “Come on.”

The words were on his tongue, lined up and waiting their turn. Caught up like that, he was still for a moment, frozen. Then he turned, watched the line of his friend’s back recede into the night.

“Sho,” he said. 

“I don’t want to hear it.”

The cold was biting at his throat, his ears. He should have worn a scarf. He’d done something wrong again, and suddenly, helplessly, he realised he didn’t know what. “Sho,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

His friend stopped. Turned around. But he wasn’t standing in the light anymore. It was too dark to read his face. Too dark to make anything of the way he stood, always straight, always correct. “Why are you sorry? You weren’t wrong. If you think you can tell me, tell me. If you think you can’t, don’t. You don’t owe me anything. You don’t owe me.”

Perhaps it was because he was talking to a shadow. A quiet, contained voice. But the words felt disembodied to Muneyoshi. He didn’t understand them. 

What did Sho mean, by ‘can’ and ‘can’t’? 

He’d been speaking just now. Clearly, that meant he could. 

“Come on,” Sho said. “You’re cold, aren’t you? Let’s go home. I’ll cook dinner.” 

There was a pause. And then his friend was unwinding his scarf from his neck, holding it out. It hung between them, old and fraying. Muneyoshi knew that scarf. Sho used to wear it to school every day, or at least until his mother wrestled it away from him and into the washing machine. It was cashmere, the most expensive things Sho’s grandparents ever gave him. They’d saved up to buy it for him, when he did so well in his middle school exams. It was his favourite scarf. “Here. You’re going to get a cold like that.”

“Mune.”

He took it. Let it fall soft and warm against his hand. 

Said, “Thanks.”

 

Because he knew that Hotaro would come to look for him after he came back from Disneyland, and because Satoshi was easier to detect than he’d thought, he was in one of the library’s group discussion rooms for all of five minutes before the door opened, and his best friend was staring at him, forehead wrinkled in clear annoyance. Shoulders tense with something else.

Satoshi waved his phone at him. “I got your text.”

There was a moment, as Hotaro hesitated between satisfying his curiosity and satisfying his need to throttle someone. Then he closed the door, pulled out the chair next to Satoshi’s. “Show me.”

How like Chii-chan he’d become. Perhaps Satoshi should be grateful. If Hotaro had never joined the Classics Club, never met his polar opposite, where would he be now? Probably in a college in Kamiyama, studying a subject he’d pulled out of the hat, not miserable but not happy. Like, what would Mayaka say, like a manga left unopened.

Had he and Chii-chan held hands in the Haunted Mansion with its 999 happy, singing ghosts? Had they licked ice creams and shared a Coke while waiting in line to get on Pooh’s Hunny Hunt? Had they climbed on Mark Twain’s boat in the sunset and, pressed against the railing, away from the children, kissed?

It was so rose-coloured he had to turn his laugh into a cough as he turned his laptop over to Hotaro. “Before we start. Can I ask why you asked me to cancel out all of southern Tohoku? That only leaves us with Akita Prefecture, which is where Kamiyama is, Aomori and Iwate.”

Hotaro folded his arms. “Southern Tohoku is generally warmer. It doesn’t fit her criteria as well, and considering that her parents weren’t interested in coming after her, it’s unlikely she felt the need to compromise.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that a wild guess? How do you know she wouldn’t compromise just in case? From what Howell-san said, she seems like the shy type.”

“What makes you say that?”

Ah. So Hotaro was angry. Otherwise he would have just told Satoshi his own reasoning, instead of having Satoshi tell him his just so he could dismiss it. Leaning back into his chair, Satoshi admitted to himself that he deserved it.

Tarot cards. To be compared to Irisu-senpai. He hadn’t expected that. 

He shrugged. “She kept to herself. Didn’t join in on activities. And so on.”

The library was heated, the room warm. Hotaro shrugged out of his coat, laid it on the table. He was wearing a green sweater under it. It made him look good, accentuated the colour of his eyes, the dark wave of his hair. 

Would he have thought about Hotaro this way if his friend hadn’t brought it up first? 

He tried to summon anger. But it was late. He’d spent more of his day thinking about other people holding hands, sharing food, and kissing, than anyone would want to. Looking at Hotaro’s grim face now, he didn’t even know if he’d done the right thing. 

“Dismissed,” his friend said. “She didn’t want to join in on on those activities. She kept to herself because she was studying. The fact that she didn’t learn to speak good English despite spending two years at an Australian school which, as you noted, had only twenty Asian students, only two of which were Japanese, suggests two things. She didn’t like it there, and was too stubborn to try to. Or she didn’t like it there and didn’t feel the need to try. Neither suggests she likes to compromise.”

He lifted his shoulders. Surrender. “Okay. I’ve left the pages open, but in sum, there are three villages that fit your criteria. Inakadate and Higashidori in Aomori, and Kunohe in Iwate. All three have populations around seven thousand. Inakadate and Kunohe are heavily dependent on agriculture, Higashidori on commercial fishing and electricity generation. There’s a wind farm and a nuclear plant there.”

“Take out Higashidori.”

“Right. Because Kamiyama is agriculture-based.”

Hotaro said nothing.

Swinging the laptop back around to himself, he deleted the window. Then opened Google Maps and typed in Inakadate and Kunohe. “We’re in luck. These two villages are about two hours away from each other by car. Kugayama-senpai could check them out easily, ask around for an Anjou Haruna who recently moved there, and in small places like that, it would be like he found her on ‘Hello Page’, huh?”

The flourescent bar above lit the room beautifully. It was the perfect place to study, even better than Satoshi’s room, where he had just a naked bulb and an old desk lamp he’d knocked over a few times by accident. But he didn’t like studying here. It was too bright. You could see how old the room was, easily. The black marker scrawls on the grey surface of the table, where at the corner of the wall the paint had peeled. 

He got up. “That was a good mystery, Hotaro. I’ll see you around.”

A hand closed around his wrist. 

His voice was bright, cheerful. “I forgot to ask, didn’t I? How did your date go?”

The grip tightened.

“Did you…” Hold hands. Share food. “Kiss her?”

Hotaro let go. His chair scraped back. He was still taller than Satoshi. Just slightly. Even though for a while there in second year, they’d been neck to neck. By the time summer rolled around, he had pulled ahead again. And Satoshi stopped growing.

“I won’t ask for an apology,” Hotaro said.

His teeth were gritted. 

“But you owe me.”

He peeled his molars apart. Bared them in a grin. “What do I owe you?”

Once in middle school, when Hotaro was forced to play basketball during P.E., he tripped and fell. He had been dribbling the ball slowly across the court, several times close to a travelling violation, when an overenthusiastic teammate swooped in on him from the side, and Hotaro very unenthusiastically attempted to step to the side, caught the one leg on the other, and landed badly. Result: twisted ankle.

Satoshi had been delegated to follow him to the nurse’s office, where Hotaro was given an iced pack, told off for playing too vigorously and then left so sit on the bed, with Satoshi as company.

Hotaro then had looked a lot like Hotaro now. Except it wasn’t the space in front of him, the world in general that he was staring at. It was Satoshi. “Don’t trouble Chitanda with this again.”

“That depends,” he heard himself say. “How close am I to proving my point? Did you kiss her?”

“Satoshi,” Hotaro said. Low, sharp. “It greatly interests me, what sort of person you think I am. Do you think I would confess to one person, and kiss someone else? Is that why you won’t give me an answer?”

“Hotaro,” he said. “Look at the facts. You know that isn’t true.”

His friend’s mouth thinned. He sat back down. Slipped his hands in his pockets. In the glare of the fluorescent light, Satoshi could see how soft the strands of his hair were, the long arch of his neck.

Would he have thought about Hotaro this way if his friend hadn’t brought it up first? 

Maybe not. But feelings didn’t change just because someone asked you to see them differently. If that were the case, all confessions of love would succeed.

Then: how did friendship become romance? He’d asked Hotaro this. 

As he opened the door, emerged into the hush of the library proper, he thought he hadn’t really been fair.

This, wasn’t a question Satoshi could have asked himself either.


	10. Chapter 10

Toudai’s Komaba Campus had big gates. Tall and grey, with an intricate black pattern on each side. It was the kind of gate he would have drawn at the start of a manga, if his characters were going to attend a scary fighting school.

It was the kind of gate that, once upon a time, he drew a lot of because he was trying to run away. Trying not to have to compete with Mune in the same genre at least. 

Sho knew the card was in his pocket, the same way he would’ve known if an LED light was attached to it and it was blinking red through the fabric of his coat, into the fading light of the short winter day. When Mune came into view, Sho found he couldn’t smile. He lifted a hand in greeting instead. 

“Why did you run?” he asked, when his friend had fallen to a stop, breath puffing visibly in the frosted air. 

Mune glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry,” he said. “Lecture ran over again. Did you wait long?”

He should just give the card to Mune here. Where he wouldn’t be tempted to make a scene. His hand reached into his pocket. 

“Hey,” said a voice behind him. “You’re not going to practice?”

Mune put a hand on his arm, tugging him closer to the pillar. He was smiling. Sho turned his head, came face to face with Koizumi Takeshi. 

People said that everyone was special to someone, someone who would accept them for who they were. But people who’d already found someone looked different to Sho. Not because there was actually something different about them, he suspected. But as if just because he knew that there was one person who wanted them, they gained a mysterious appeal to him. 

What was special about them, that they were wanted?

It was partially with these eyes that he took in Koizumi’s soft, black curls, his defined features, and thought he could see how they might be attractive. But he also felt a latent hostility. Not something he could pin down, because he’d so stupidly stopped Mune in the middle of telling him, but a criticalness nonetheless. 

“No,” Mune was saying. “My friend and I are going somewhere for the weekend, and we’re planning our trip.”

Koizumi flicked his eyes towards him, the same lack of recognition in them, an awkward politeness. “Really? Where?”

Mune tipped his head to the side, gave him a peace sign. “Sorry, that’s a secret.” And then, “I should introduce you two, shouldn’t I?” Pointing his thumb at each of them in turn, he said, “Jiro, Koizumi Takeshi. Takeshi, Tanabe Jiro. Jiro’s from Kamiyama, like me. He’s a mangaka.”

The automatic half-interest that always generated. “Cool. Are you published?”

“Sho was runner up for the last Tezuka Award.”

Mune was still holding on to his arm. He pulled away and then shoved his best friend in the shoulder. Who tottered to the side a step and laughed. 

“Congratulations,” Koizumi said. “That’s a great achievement. I’ll have to buy the issue and read it.” Then he looked at his watch. “I have to go, but it was good to see you, Mune.” His words slowed, became cautious. “You’ll be coming to practice again when you’re back, right?”

A hand ran through tousled hair. “Well, I’ll see. I need to get an internship this summer, and CV writing is really eating up my time.”

“Just come once.” A hesitation. “It would mean a lot, to Kaede. And me. It’ll be just like old times.”

Mune tucked his hands into his pockets, scraped his shoes on the gravel. It was what he did when he was centering himself, stalling before he had to answer. “Okay. Sure. It’s not like I want to be chained to my desk all the time.”

They said goodbye, started walking down the street. Sho knew where they were going this time, so he knew when his friend nearly missed the right pedestrian crossing. He pulled Mune into the crush of people waiting to cross. Looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Mune looked back, then laughed. “Don’t look so worried, Sho. We solved it. The problem. It’s done.”

The light turned green. Ticking rapidly, urging them across the wide street to the other side. He wanted to ask, then why do you still look so unhappy? 

Steeling himself, he opened his mouth to do just that. 

Just because he wasn’t going to let his best friend tell him something out of a misplaced sense of obligation, didn’t mean he was going to stop asking. If Mune needed or wanted to tell him, the window would already be open. Asking and asking, was all he could do. 

“Oh,” Mune said suddenly, as they were almost on the other side. He whirled around to look at Sho properly, warm eyes bright. “Wasn’t your meeting with your editor today? What did he say?”

The card was still in his pocket. A blinking LED light.

Sho knew when his own face closed down. He could feel the muscles locking up. See the reactive wariness lock down Mune’s. 

He didn’t want to feel like this. Reaching into his pocket, he ripped the card out, held it out to his friend. His voice was remarkably even. “Yujiro-san asked me to give this to you.”

Fingers reached out to take it. They were standing beside the black pole of a pedestrian light on a Thursday afternoon. People surged around them, cars and voices loud, intrusive. Instinctively, Mune moved closer to the pole. It only took him a second to understand what the card was. “Sho,” he said. “Why…”

“Wait,” he’d said, when Yujiro-san was about to leave, the envelope with Jiro’s names under his arm. “I have a bar of that chocolate Fukuda-san said he likes. Let me just go get it?”

Yujiro-san stopped at the doorway. “You found it? He’s always going on about how rare it is now!”

“It was a small store. Probably old stock. Just wait a moment.” The echo of ‘thanks’ followed him into the kitchen. When he opened the fridge, he’d been thinking that maybe he should bring snacks on the trip too. They were probably going to take the train down to Iwate and then rent a car there. How did people go around renting cars anyway? They would have to look it up online.

When he came back out, Yujiro-san was holding a book in his hands. Jiro’s envelope, he’d laid on the desk. When he let the book’s pages fall shut, its cover became visible. A thicker piece of lilac cardboard over cheap paper, to keep the production costs down. For the same reason, no colour. Just a girl, a beautiful girl with a look in her eyes that for Jiro still had a magnetism, a promise of sadness that he wanted to know, to disassemble. Why did it linger?

“Tanabe-kun!” He sounded so excited, just like Sho had been when Anjou first suggested the project and he saw Mune’s first sketch of the main character. Just a sketch like that. It hadn’t been a threat. A judgement on him and his limited potential. Not yet.

“This Ajimu Takuha, it’s a pen name, right? Who’s the mangaka? I’ve never seen this before, but this is really good. Has he drawn anything else? Actually, can I borrow this? I want to know how it ends.”

He’d made himself smile. It wasn’t an entirely bitter feeling. It was nice to know that masterpieces, as he heard one of the Manga Society girls had argued so convincingly on the first day of that cultural festival, really did exist. That Mune and Anjou were more than a legend he’d told himself, in the snow globe world of their school. 

At least he’d set his sights high. 

“He saw A Corpse By Evening on my desk,” he said to Mune. Someone jostled him, a shoulder knocking into his own. He moved closer, so it was almost as though they were huddled together in the thin shadow of the pedestrian light. “He said that if you and Anjou ever wanted to publish this properly, to contact him. And if you ever drew anything else and were interested in publishing, to contact him. Congratulations,” was his voice sufficiently neutral. “You’ve been headhunted, Mune.”

Mune looked at him for a moment. Then just as neutrally, he pocketed the card. “Thank Yujiro-san for Anjou and me. I’m glad he liked it so much. We can tell Anjou what he said if we find her.” He turned, locking his hands together behind his head. Jiro could see the edge of his smile. “Maybe it’ll make her want to move to Tokyo.”

They were in a crowded street on a Thursday afternoon. Jiro didn’t want to make a scene. He wasn’t given to making scenes, generally. Mune directed people as easily as he could put a can down on a table in a chaotic classroom. But Jiro had always had the clearer head. 

But then, neither of them were really playing the roles they were supposed to. People changed, he guessed. Not always for the better. Just as Mune seemed to have gained a new habit of apologising for himself, making himself smaller to fit into the corners of his own life, Jiro’s resentment had only grown in the few years he thought he’d found relief.

He grabbed the back of Mune’s coat collar, jerked him to a stop. “What about you?” There was nothing neutral about his voice. “Why don’t you take him up on the offer?”

His best friend rotated to face him. Tucked his hands into his pockets. Scraped his shoes on the pavement. “I’m not interested in drawing manga, Sho. Not for a living.”

“It doesn’t have to be for a living.”

“Of course it does.”

“If you don’t want to be published in Weekly Shonen Jump, there are plenty of monthly, even quarterly, even semi-annual magazines you could put your work into. And they would have the same reaction as Yujiro-san. You can be published anywhere you want. I’m sure.”

Mune tensed. “It’s not that easy, Sho. You’re overestimating me.” The hands came out of the pockets, went back in. And the words surged out, hard as a troupe of stones rolling one by one down a hill. “I’m having trouble just drawing for Kudryavka’s Order, much less…”

“What?”

The surprise in his voice was unkind. He knew that. The disbelief. But it was how he really felt. He’d never been good at keeping honesty out of his voice. 

His friend sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I haven’t drawn manga for so long. Or you know what they say. Once you hit twenty, you aren’t a prodigy anymore. You’re just normal. I’m just normal, Sho. And I have a lot less experience than you. Is it,” sharply. “that unbelievable I could hit a wall?”

He stepped back, an instinctive reaction to that sharpness. But his hands clenched into fists. It wasn’t even something to be angry about. If Mune hadn’t said it in that way, he might not have been angry. If Yujiro-san hadn’t said what he said, he might not have been angry. If they didn’t have the competition to think about, them going to see Anjou in two days, he might not have been angry. 

If Sho was a better person, like Mune, who was always so free, so warm with his praise, his pride in Sho’s achievements, then maybe it wouldn’t have come to this. Again. “It is unbelievable! This is you!”

Slitted eyes. The warmth gone. “What does that mean?”

“The first time you drew for A Corpse By Evening, you just sat down at your desk after class, and randomly sketched something! And that was the first page.”

“It wasn’t random. It took me an hour and a half, and I was thinking about it before. And,” with some vehemence, because Mune had more or less given up on this line of argument in second year. “You helped with the backgrounds!”

“Yeah,” Jiro said. “That was a lot of help I gave you. Great experience for when I became an assistant. Drawing out the screen tones by hand. I’m sure it helped a great deal, seeing as you couldn’t have possibly finished the whole damn thing in a week without me doing those tones for you.”

“Mangaka finish chapters in a week all the time…”

“Professional mangaka,” he said. “People who do it for a living. Like you could, at the drop of a hat. Because you’ve got the talent. You’ve got the bloody talent and you do with it what you always do with everything in your life. Fuck all.”

It was the swearing that made Mune flinch. He’d known it would. His words wouldn’t, why would they? They’d had this argument a million times. Just not so publicly, in a world where dozens of pairs of feet like a house of mirrors thundered past, uncaring. 

They were just two kids from Kamiyama. Their fight, their jealousies, meant nothing.

Jiro understood this. He’d learned this in Tokyo, where there were so many people just like him, people with bigger dreams, whose one opponent in the whole world wasn’t their best friend from a dying, ageing town in the middle of nowhere, who looked at Jump, who looked forward instead of always looking back. 

Abruptly, he couldn’t take himself anymore. 

He stepped back. When had he leaned so far forward, gotten so much into Mune’s space? Slipped his own hands into his pockets. “You know what,” he said, voice finally calm. Flat. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have to show Anjou anything anyway. She’s got her own life. No need to drag her into a competition like this.”

Mune’s shoulders were stiff. A wall of suppressed rebellion. “Don't worry. The competition’s still on. I’ll have it done before we leave.”

Jiro narrowed his eyes. “We’re leaving on Saturday, Mune.”

His best friend’s hands came up, palms out, the most acid gesture of helplessness that Jiro had ever seen. “I’m talented, aren’t I? I can do anything. But if you don’t mind giving me a handicap anyway, Sho, maybe you could go plan our trip at home. Give me the time to finish. You can help me with that at least, right?”

It was Jiro’s turn to flinch. He looked at the distance cracking, opening up between them and saw only fire. A red-hot rage that burned all other emotion to a crisp, made him feel a curious, paradoxical nothing. “Sure,” he said. “Leave it to me.”

The remainder of the path they walked together, before Jiro could turn right to the subway station, and Mune could turn left to his apartment, they said a grand total of nothing. 

 

The Anjou Haruna mystery has been solved. And Hotaro was once again staring at a single sheet of paper that he’d dug up from underneath a stack of other junk. Three reasons how he was in like with his best friend.

One. They spent more time together alone.

Two. He wanted to spend time alone with him.

Three. He wanted to kiss him. 

He crossed his arms, laid his head on them. When he exhaled, the paper trapped beneath him rustled. He needed more information. He needed an angle. He needed a challenge to respond to, something to start with.

Turning his head, he stared over his arm to the pen on the desk. Shifted a hand, grasped it. Then sat up. Maybe if he wrote down the question Chitanda asked him. 

Why did Satoshi want him to prove he liked him?

Not because it was fun. Chitanda was right. Although Satoshi no longer cared about winning or losing, a certain outcome wouldn’t be fun to him. And his best friend had an irritating inferiority complex with regard to his own abilities. It’d only grown worse since high school. 

Because he was being charitable? Chitanda saying his name at the entrance, when his head had been filled with embarassing thoughts, when he had had to take his gloves off because he was nervous. All that wasted energy. Hotaro ran his hands though his hair. He should have throttled Satoshi. Even if it meant more wasted energy.

More calmly. Was it?

Satoshi had known about Chitanda’s breakup with her boyfriend. Probably because he’d been helping Chitanda with her business meetings here in Tokyo. If Satoshi believed Hotaro still had feelings for her, and confessed anyway, Satoshi’s anger that night would be comprehensible. 

And his friend could be spiteful when he wanted to be. In that passive aggressive way in which he now dealt with all his problems.

It was an explanation.

But something didn’t connect.

He crossed his arms over his chest, dropped his head. His fingers started to comb through his fringe. 

The knock broke his train of thought.

A second knock.

He sighed. Stood up and pulled open the door. 

“Hotaro.” The object of his current headache stood in the corridor in flip flops and a faded T-shirt, eyes glittering with mischief. It made Hotaro feel a rush of embarassing heat. And then a teddy bear was shoved right up in his face. He grabbed it before it made contact, glared at Satoshi. Who just laughed. “Can you take this to the Crafts Club for me tomorrow? It’s the submission deadline.”

“Why can’t you take it yourself?”

Satoshi lifted his shoulders. “I would, but I’m going somewhere. Oh, and sign the registration sheet for me too, would you? Akutagawa-sensei’s a real pain in the neck like that.”

“Where are you going?”

“Kamiyama.”

A shake of the head before Hotaro could open his mouth. “I’m not going home, so there’s no point in coming with me. I’m visiting Mayaka.”

Hotaro hadn’t felt this way since he watched Yamashita talking to Chitanda through 3-A’s classroom door, words rapid, the atmosphere as awkward as the rattling bones of a walking skeleton. “Why?”

His best friend looked away, down the corridor. It was empty. Nothing to see. “We haven’t seen each other in a while. Phones and Skype aren’t the same, you know? And there are things I want to ask her.”

“What things.”

When Satoshi turned back, he wasn’t smiling anymore. “I know you said you wouldn’t ask me to apologise, Hotaro. But you don’t have to. I’ll apologise myself. I’m sorry. This,” and usually Satoshi would make an expansive gesture here, take in the air around them. “Doesn’t really have anything to do with you. I started this because I was angry with you, but I don’t think you can fix it. It’s my fault.”

The corridor was colder than his room. Outside the bare windows, the sky was turning dark. The sun somewhere, invisible, setting. “What?”

“The competition,” Satoshi said. “It’s off.”

The thing that hadn’t connected. What was it? 

He was squeezing the teddy bear, the fabric soft in his fingers. Satoshi had stuffed it properly, so it didn’t feel knobbly like the others. Satoshi had gotten it right, finally. But Satoshi wouldn’t see it like that. He would see it as the seventh go-around, the completion of a natural process of try and try again until you succeed. To Satoshi, life was a conveyor belt. There was no point in getting excited about anything, because all had its place. Winning. Losing. The only thing you could get excited when there was nothing, in Satoshi’s mind, was everything. 

Life was a conveyor belt to Hotaro too. A gray line moving him forward, whether he noticed or not. Whether he cared or not. That was how he liked it. How he wanted it.

But there were sights along the way. The sakura in Chitanda’s hair, after the sakura were meant to have died. Bright orange poppies on the road home from school, Ibara heckling him all the while. An autumn leaf tumbling across the zebra crossing as Satoshi shot past, bag swinging, free hand circling round and round in an exaggerated and unnecessary farewell. 

Satoshi had said, Hotaro was confusing romance with friendship. 

There wasn’t any reason for Hotaro to like him. 

That Hotaro liked someone else. 

Satoshi wanted Hotaro to prove he liked him. Not because he’d confused their relationship. Because that was just fodder for his friend to laugh at him. Hotaro’s crush on Chitanda had been just that. Not because Hotaro liked someone else. Because that was the task Satoshi had set himself, and he didn’t believe, not deep down inside in that part of him Hotaro couldn’t understand, that he could win.

But now he was saying, he didn’t think Hotaro could win either. 

Deduction came down to this. The elimination of all irrational connections, the linking up of all rational ones into one network, one code with one outcome.

Why did Satoshi want proof?

Because he didn’t think he had what it took to make people love him. To be special to someone in that way. 

In essence, what Satoshi was asking him to prove was not that he liked him. He wanted Hotaru to prove that his liking him was not just a passing fancy, an accidental whim. That his feelings had most certainly, irrevocably changed.

Deduction rationalised people’s actions in the past. Because of this, it could sometimes be used to extrapolate into their present, and their future. It was an uncertain thing at best. Nonetheless, if Satoshi had been thinking along this vein, his expectations were not incomprehensible.

The problem was that this question was about Hotaro’s future. And as he realised now that they should have both known from the start, the one thing Hotaro had always been most unreliable about deducting was himself. 

“Hotaro?” His friend peered close, forehead wrinkled in concern. “Are you okay?” A hand tugged at the bear in his. “It’s just you’re crushing poor old teddy here. My life’s work for the past few weeks.”

He loosened his fingers. He couldn’t look into Satoshi’s face. “Sorry.”

There was nothing else to say.


	11. Chapter 11

Akita International University was easier to get to than Kamiyama. The train ride from Tokyo was shorter, for one thing. Then it was just a matter of taking the Akita Airport Bus out to where the campus was located an hour from the city centre. Satoshi looked at the snow piled thick outside the window, catching the sunlight and glittering with it, and allowed himself to fall asleep until a tinny voice announced his destination. And there was Mayaka already, at the bus stop. Bundled up in yellow scarf, pink coat, and maroon hat, waving to him. It made him smile. All that colour on somone other than himself. Hotaro and Chii-chan wore dull and pastel respectively.

Hotaro had been staring dully at the floor when he shut the door in Satoshi’s face. 

Satoshi knew he wasn’t a good person. Someone who strung a good friend along just because he couldn’t say yes but didn’t want to say no either, someone who made a competition out of a confession, someone who sent people on dates that they didn’t know about and wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot pole, someone who did these things because they were angry at themselves, really, wasn’t a good person.

He’d thought that calling off the competition would be the right thing to do. The good thing to do. He’d expected that Hotaro would demand his answer, or at least a reason why. His best friend liked his reasons. 

But Hotaro had just stood there, crushing the stuffed toy in his hand, said ‘sorry’ and closed the door. 

Satoshi set out to hurt other people. It was like he never learned what the consequences felt like. 

When he descended from the bus, overnight bag slung on his shoulder, he and Mayaka stood opposite each other for a moment. Testing, uncertain. Phoning and Skype-ing weren’t the same as meeting, after all. 

And then either one or the other moved, and they were hugging. Mayaka’s breath was warm on his cheek. 

“You look exactly the same,” he declared when he let her go. 

Unimpressed. “Of course I do. You saw me yesterday.”

He scratched the back of his head, acknowledged this with a shrug. Then smiled. “So? Aren’t you going to show me your lovely campus?”

His friend’s face lit up, bright and open as a poppy. “I’ll show you the library,” she said. “And the bridge. Those are my favourite places. The rest will have to wait.”

Satoshi reared back. “Eh…Mayaka, are you busy? You’re going to leave me alone when I came all the way to see you!”

Her eyes narrowed. “The rest will have to wait, because I want to know.”

“Know?” He smiled.

“I want to know why you came all the way to see me, you jerk.”

The library was lovely. It was the good thing about a new university, he guessed. All that clean, new-ish wood, the domed, windowed roof, all the light spilling in and turning everything honey warm. This far out, you could probably even see the stars at night. He asked Mayaka this when they walked out of its hush, into the snow white grounds of the campus, and she affirmed it. “It’s beautiful,” she said. 

The way she tipped her head, grinned up at him, took him back to high school. Of the four of them, he thought, Mayaka really had changed the least. Maybe that had been for the best. 

Of course, the river beneath the bridge was frozen over. A small wooden bridge, the kind you could see in storybooks sometimes, arched to give it more stability. They brushed the snow off the railing with their gloves, stood there in the afternoon sun, Mayaka pointing out things in the distance, telling him about a skating competition she’d had with her friends just down this stream. 

It’d been a while since he was with someone as talkative as himself. With Hotaro and Chii-chan, conversations often ground to a certain, though not uncomfortable stop. In high school, he’d often found them together just like that, sitting quietly in the club room with nothing to say. 

When had that together-ness become something he envied? Something he wanted?

“Hey, Mayaka,” he said. 

It was a natural pause in their naturally flowing conversation, between the end of a story she told and his began. Her mouth closed, and the expansive emotions in her face faded away, replaced by expectation. 

“You don’t like me anymore, do you?”

A beat.

Her eyes widened.

And Satoshi got smacked on the head. Hard. “Ow!”

“You came down to ask me that. You did, didn’t you?” When all he did was rub his scalp and wave a helpless hand, she slammed both her hands down on the railing, lowered her head and let out a soft scream through her teeth. “Fuku-chan, you’re unbelievable!”

“I was just asking,” he said. “I don’t think you do.”

She glared at him out of the corner of her eye. “What makes you think that?”

He stopped rubbing. 

Mayaka sighed. “You’re such a coward, Fuku-chan. No, I don’t.”

“Sorry.” He tried to keep the relief out of his voice. From his friend’s intensifying, yet queerly harmless brand of contempt, he probably hadn’t. 

“So? Why did you want to ask me that?”

Satoshi put his elbows on the railing. The wood scraped against the wool of his coat. “I’ve just got one more question.”

His friend’s head came up properly. “Why do I think I’m not going to like it.”

He gave her a smile. There was something wrong with him today. All the feelings kept poking out, like the stuffing in experiments one to six that he hadn’t been able to get right. Those poor toys. He should do them properly. He should do them again so that they were perfect, and he could sell them or give them away to people who would love them.

“Why did you stop liking me?”

He’d thought Mayaka would hit him again. Or at least narrow her eyes even more so that they became pink slits of judgement. Instead, her mouth softened. She turned away from him, stared out at the river instead. The ice was still thick, probably. Probably, the day after tomorrow Mayaka would come out here and skate with her friends again. Take a couple of photos and post them on Facebook. Comment when Satoshi ‘liked’ them. 

Probably, she wouldn’t, and Satoshi would just never know.

“I never really made a decision,” she said. “I didn’t sit down one day and say, I’m not going to like Fuku-chan anymore, and that was that. It was more, I guess, like I realised that liking you, there was no real point to it. And after a while, I just didn’t. People move on, I guess.”

The strain in his voice was really obvious. “Why…”

“Are you seriously going to ask me why there was no point? Mr Chocolate Thief?”

He looked at his boots. 

“So? Who’s the lucky girl?”

He flicked his gaze up at her. Some of the bitterness in her voice was in her face too, a slight crease of her eyebrows, a tightness at the corners of her eyes. “You know,” she said. “The one who’s managed to get you to think seriously about what’s wrong. It’s almost enough to make a girl jealous, you know, even if I don’t like you anymore.”

Satoshi said, with more force than necessary. “There isn’t one.”

She smiled. “No?”

He shook his head. “If I’m doing it for anyone, then I’m doing it for myself.”

The cynicism collapsed into more typical Mayaka. Mayaka as she was now, as she had always been, when she was not being in love with him. “Hah?”

He wasn’t used to doing this. Telling his friends things that mattered. Back in school, he’d told Hotaro things only when he felt he had to make him understand, only when he owed him. It didn’t suit him. Seriousness. He tipped his head and tried a smile. “I guess there are times when I do things, that make me a bad person. And at some point, I didn’t want to feel like that anymore. Like I disliked myself.”

It surprised him, when Mayaka took his gloved hand in hers. The first time she’d touched him since they started talking about this. It reminded him of when she told them she was not going to Tokyo with them, would be moving to Akita instead to attend university. When just sitting across the table, he’d realised for the first time how far they were going to grow apart. 

“Fuku-chan,” she said. “You never not dislike yourself.”

He blinked at her. Then let his eyes fall half-shut, the grin that made Hotaro twitch sliding onto his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But Mayaka wasn’t Hotaro. She only said, “Fuku-chan. Trust me. There’s nothing wrong with you, not anything that makes you a bad person. But there’s something I need you to promise to do. For yourself.”

Satoshi frowned. “What?”

“With this girl.”

“There isn’t – ”

“I know,” she said. “She’s not important. I get it. And that’s good. Because you can’t do this for her.”

He was getting impatient. “What?”

Mayaka brought her other hand up, so that she was clasping his one in both of hers. Even through the fabric, he could feel her warmth. “Don’t end it before it’s over.”

The anger he’d felt when Hotaro confessed. It was coming back, low and electric in his chest. But instead of sharpness, an explosiveness that wouldn’t go away, not until he’d found some way to explain it to someone, he found that his eyes were blurring. He blinked. Blinked again. “Mayaka,” he sniffed. “That’s really cryptic. You sound like Hotaro. Can you believe that? You sound like Hotaro.”

She drew him into a hug. Her words rustled in his ear. “Silly. There’s no way that idiot could say something this smart.”

 

Sho was always exaggerating. 

One page in two hours. That was Muneyoshi’s average. A rough sketch took about ninety minutes, and then refining it and colouring it in black and white took thirty. 

Sure, he could do pages in less sometimes, like with the first page of A Corpse By Evening, but that was because, despite the detail of the background, it was a simple design; just one full page of the protagonist Takeda Riko walking out of the school gates, with the character design already thought out beforehand. 

It was four in the afternoon on Thursday. Probably, Sho would have them leave on Saturday at ten, to miss the morning rush. Assuming he didn’t sleep or take a break, he had forty-two hours. That was twenty-four pages. Telling a story as complex as Kudryavka’s Order in twenty-four pages was impossible. A Corpse By Evening had been almost three times that length. 

Muneyoshi stared at the sheaf of blank sheets on his desk, the mechanical pencil placed so neatly next to them. He buried his face in his hands. 

Why had he said that to Sho? Why hadn’t he just admitted it was his fault for not trying harder? Why had he gotten so upset, so angry? It wasn’t like he hadn’t known the deadline. If he was having trouble, he should have said so earlier. Instead, he’d done what he was always doing now, and stuck his head in the sand. Sho was right to be mad at him. Maybe he should just call, apologise. How could he have done that, delegated the trip planning to Sho like that, as if he had the right?

But the look on Sho’s face, the way he’d said, ‘this is you’. Sho had cursed at him.

It had been Muneyoshi’s fault for not saying something before. It had been his fault for not trying harder.

But he hadn’t wanted this competition. It was like the last term of first year, the first two of second year all over again. When every month he’d been just waiting for Sho to tense up, to explode at him, either because they were somehow reminded of Muneyoshi’s ability to draw, or Sho’s inability to draw as well as him. 

How had they stayed friends? He didn’t even know anymore. 

He drew his legs up onto the chair, wrapped his arms around them. It was loud in his room. The jam of cars outside the window, the crush of people. With his headphones off, he could hear Konno playing Final Fantasy in the living room. His head felt like an itchy, uncomfortable minefield. He dug his hands into his hair. Closed his eyes. Forty-two hours. What was he going to do?

What was he even doing it for? 

He had to take himself out of the equation. But how could he do that, when the whole reason he was doing something so stupid in the first place was because of himself?

No. He didn’t have time for this. Dropping his legs to the floor, he pulled his chair up to the table and picked up the pencil. Forty-two hours and sixty-something pages. He didn’t have the luxury to think about it.

He just had to draw. 

The first page took three hours. He kept looking at the clock, kept messing up his lines, and the character design just wasn’t right. Before he could add the finishing touches, he gave up. Crumpled up the sheet and started again. Thirty-nine hours. 

He was just trying to draw silence. When had something so bland gotten so difficult? Who was he trying to be? No one could finish a manga oneshot in less than two days. This was stupid. This was pride. Another choice he’d made just because he couldn't keep his head straight, keep track of how other people felt. 

But it wasn’t his fault. 

He hadn’t wanted a competition with Sho.

Why had he said yes, then?

He just wanted to draw.

Something outside of himself. 

He crumpled up this sheet too. Outside, Konno wasn’t playing Final Fantasy anymore. When he looked up, through the slats of his window blinds, the sky had turned dark. He had thirty-six hours left. 

Leaning back, he let his eyes fall shut for a moment. Maybe he was going about this wrong. He didn’t have time for detailed backgrounds. Beautiful, whimsical characters. Long explanations of the many clues and theories.

These were things that Kudryavka’s Order deserved. But he had to be practical. 

Silence. Kudryavka. The Russian dog that had been sent to space. What had she seen up there? Had there been a window in the rocket? He didn’t know much about them. He’d read on Wikipedia, when Anjou first told them the name, that Kudryavka had died of overheating in the first few hours of the flight. What was that like? Had she just burned up? Melted? Turned to ash? Had she even gotten to see anything, trapped in her little metal space? The stars. The earth. And if she had, what would it have meant to her?

His stomach was whining. He got up, opened the door. The living room was dark. Had Konno eaten already? He glanced up at the wall clock. Nine p.m. He should have been hungry earlier. Going to the fridge, he dug out a sandwich. Ham. Cheese. Some water from the tap, gushing into a glass. Wandering back into his room. 

Sitting down again, he reached for his headphones, stuck them over his ears. Flipped open his laptop and set his playlist on shuffle. 

Order. What was beautiful or whimsical about order?

His right hand was cramped. He stretched his fingers out, waggled them, then picked up his pencil again. Looked at the clean, steel line of it. 

Thirty-six hours. Sixty-something pages. Blank paper. Silence. Just a footstep in a corridor, an echo in three panels.

This wasn’t how he should do it. Already, a discomfort was crawling into him, an irritation like ants on the back of his neck. Muneyoshi didn’t like doing things when he couldn’t do them right. In that way, he was a lot like Sho. 

He couldn’t think about Sho now.

Thirty-six hours, and counting down. 

The second song on his playlist started up, the twang of guitar strings vibrating in the first quiet bar, and Muneyoshi forced himself to draw. The pen to move, even if what came out wasn’t what he wanted. 

The hours passed. He put aside one page, and then another. 

At some point, they began to blur together. He forgot about lines, about beauty. About what was right or wrong to draw. He didn’t have the time. And he forgot about why he didn’t. What he was doing this for.

The music in his ears segued into one long jumble of instruments and voices. 

At page something-or-other, his headphones were torn off. “Hey,” said Konno. It was weird to hear a voice that wasn’t lilted in song. His eyes ached. There was a crick in his neck. “Didn’t you hear me? It’s lunch time. You really need to answer your door.”

“Lunch time,” he repeated. It was weird to hear his own voice too. 

“Yeah.” Konno dropped his headphones on the desk. Peered at the sheets he’d stacked to one side. “Wait, is this…?”

But Muneyoshi wasn’t listening. He unclenched his fingers from around the pencil, laid it down neatly next to the sheet he was working on. Looked at the clean, steel line of it. In a moment, he would be irritated with himself again. The state of the art before him. But right then, for once, his mind was empty. Open. 

Sometime in the last sixteen hours, he had gone outside of himself.


	12. Chapter 12

At ten in the morning, the mouth to the bus station near Toudai wasn’t that busy. Employees were holed up in their offices, waiting for the lunch hour and their release into the freedom of the weekend. Parents were still wrestling their children into clothes and prams for shopping trips to the malls. The students that made up the majority of this area’s inhabitants were probably asleep.

Normally, Jiro would be at work. His shift started at nine. He and Matsumoto-san shared the morning shift on Saturdays, so they would take turns manning the cashier, stocking the muffins that came fresh every day, wiping down the tables in the café, and Matsumoto-san would tell him stories about Natsu-chan, who was ten years old now and a lot like her father. 

Your boyfriend, Matsumoto-san had said. 

Jiro tugged on the straps of his backpack, sighed. How hard was it to just apologise? Bow his head, say ‘sorry’. For swearing. Saying what he’d said. 

It wasn’t like he’d never had trouble drawing before. Sometimes there was just a block. You had to work past it. It was one of those things that got easier with time, with practice, and Mune didn’t even draw that often.

Because to Mune, drawing was a hobby. He did it for fun. 

Jiro was still holding the straps of his backpack. Too tightly. He let go. He had to, or he wouldn’t have been able to raise a hand, wave at Mune, who’d just come into sight round the corner of the street.

It wasn’t like he was trying to pick a fight. Just. When Mune was close enough for his face to be visible, his mouth moved on its own. “You look like shit.”

His best friend was too tired for his face to tense properly, but his gaze was searching. After a moment, he smiled. Bowed. “Sorry,” he said. “For what I said. It was out of line. Thank you for planning the trip.”

His head came back up. “If it’s okay, can we just forget it and have fun?”

Mune was wearing a backpack too. Jiro recognised this one. His friend had worn it when his parents drove him down to Tokyo, his own and Jiro’s stuff in the boot and crowding the back seat. Mune’d told him he felt like luggage himself, the whole six and a half hours down by car. Jostling about, all his tender bits getting stabbed by the sharp ends of boxes and the dusty wheels of suitcases.

Had Mune finished it? The manuscript? Had he really done it in less than two days?

Was he really thinking about this now?

He said, “I’m sorry too. And okay, let’s forget about it.”

They stood opposite each other. Jiro resisted the urge to hold out his hand, have his friend shake it. Like they were kids being forced to make up on the playground after a fight at recess. Or adults who barely knew each other, saying hello. Goodbye.

Mune asked, “Which bus is it? I’ve got change…”

He probably looked away too quickly, to where his hand was slipping into his pocket, drawing out a folded piece of paper. “The Keio Inakashira line, but don’t worry. I bought our tickets online. You can pay me back later.”

“Thanks.” 

On the bus, Mune let him have the window seat. It seemed more automatic than intentioned, and when his best friend had stored his bag under the seat before his, done his seatbelt, he leaned his head back and fell asleep. His breath evened out almost before they started moving.

The traffic wasn’t too bad. They made good time along the traditionally congested streets, the highways, until they were at the edges of Tokyo proper, skyscrapers packed together like sardines giving way to more isolated buildings in larger, scattered plots. And eventually, to open ground.

When they were seventeen years old, their year had gone on a trip to Nakijin Prefecture in Okinawa. They’d taken buses there, a two-coach nightmare for their teachers, and an adventure for them. Jiro could still remember singing karaoke on the bus. One portable microphone that almost everyone wanted, and no one would actually claim. Having it pushed onto him once. The song. What had it been called?

He’d concentrated so hard on the lyrics as he sang. The melody. It wasn’t like he was a professional singer or anything, or like his classmates actually expected him to be any good. But he hadn’t wanted to be bad. He hadn’t wanted to suck. Having put so much effort into it, he should at least be able to remember the song title. Did Mune?

His best friend’s mouth was open. He was snoring. Jiro had only ever heard him snore once, the weekend before the cultural festival, when they’d both fallen asleep in the classroom the executive committee had been allocated, Jiro at his desk, and Mune somehow stretched out on the floor, on top of a couple of squashed streamers and a red banner with a smeared ‘kami’. 

He must be tired. 

Jiro found his eyes drawn to the backpack, shoved under the seat. His own backpack was between his legs, the sixty-two pages of his manuscript in a folder, the cover kept shut by a tightly wound string. 

It didn’t matter if Mune hadn’t finished his own manuscript.

It didn’t matter who won this competition. Anjou was just one person. Kudryavka’s Order was just one story. Yujiro-san had called him yesterday. After the serialisation meeting. Jiro had said goodbye and immediately scrolled down to where Mune’s name was. His thumb on ‘Call’.

Why hadn’t he pressed it?

He knew Mune would be happy to know. Mune was glad of Jiro’s achievements in a way that Jiro didn’t think he could reciprocate. If Jiro had called, he could’ve told him, and then apologised. Or apologised and then told him. Did any of it matter?

Yes.

It felt wrong to him. Like…

Mune’s head was sliding to one side. Jiro caught it with a hand before it reached a stage that would give Mune a crick in the neck when he woke up, pushed it back to its original position. The hair was soft, softer than he’d dreamed. 

If he leaned in, kissed his best friend’s lips, what would Mune do? Would he wake up? Would his mouth be as hot as Jiro remembered?

It would be okay, better to do it now, while they weren’t fighting, in the ceasefire before judgement was given and between them, no one had lost and no one won. If he kissed him now, then all the implications he’d been worried about wouldn’t matter. 

Not until.

Dropping his hand, Jiro turned away, looked outside. They were on a wide road, bare winter earth on either side. The sun was pale, a cataract in a deep blue sky. 

He wasn’t able to tell Mune. He couldn’t kiss him now. It felt wrong. Like crossing no man’s land, hands palm outwards and gun tossed on the ground, and reaching up, to pluck a button from his shirt, toss it into the lap of the enemy. Something small. Something, nonetheless, that was a part of a much larger whole. 

In third year, Jiro knew, there came a time when he’d learned how to reconcile them. The black and white. The friend and foe. Their third year at high school had been the easiest, the most uncomplicated. Maybe it was because they’d realised then how limited all their time was. How far they could grow apart.

He’d worked so hard to get to that point. He should at least remember how.

It wa about four hours to Iwate Prefecture. If in that time Mune’s head dropped off to the side again, if he opened his eyes and glanced at Jiro, if he looked at his backpack under the seat, the manuscript that might or might not be inside, Jiro didn’t know. 

He was staring out the window. Asking himself:

If he won? 

He would move on. Haul himself up and over the stepping stone, to the next level.

And because want it or not, he could: if he lost?

The answer didn’t come to him straight away. Not because, he suspected, he hadn’t known it. Because at their core, few people really disliked themselves. Few people wanted to admit that they were as bad inside as they sometimes thought they were. 

He didn’t tell himself his answer on the bus, or on the next bus, or on the Shinkansen they transferred to, zipping away into the Tohoku countryside. He didn’t tell himself when they walked from the train station to the car rental he’d Googled, and pooled their money together to rent a car to get to the first village. Kunohe. They could have taken a bus there maybe, but he’d been unable to get any sense of a route between Kunohe and Inakadate. Better to rent a car for the day and use a map.

When they stopped the car in Kunohe, outside the old brown and whilte building that was the village hall, and when Mune was about to walk inside, Jiro grabbed his arm, forced him to stop, to look in the direction he was looking, he didn’t tell himself the answer either.

Not until Anjou Haruna’s name was dying on Mune’s lips, and the girl with the short dark hair, the long floral skirt, and the face that was older, longer, harder and softer at the same time, turned around. Recognition sparked in her eyes. Her lips stretched into a smile.

And as her mouth opened to call back to them, Jiro shelved their resumed friendship, repacked their high school years, so that only the bad, so often stronger than the good, was left on the mantelpiece of his mind. Foremost in this was the tiredness. Unfair or not, cowardly or not, wrong or not, he was tired. And his unfair answer, his coward’s answer, his wrong answer, he told it to himself at last. 

If he lost?

Well. How many times could you fight over the same things, make up over the same things, before you had to start asking yourself, what were you even doing it for?


	13. Chapter 13

In Kamiyama, Muneyoshi and Anjou lived on the same street. He’d passed her house every day on the way to school, and sometimes if she was leaving at the same time, they walked together. Anjou was a quiet person, like Sho, but her voice had been less calm assurance and more a vibrating irony. Muneyoshi had gotten the impression that she often came out of her house after a fight, the disaffection still fresh on her face.

Her house in Iwate was down a similar street, and had a similar small garden with empty boxes in the window and a garden lined by empty pots. But in Anjou’s face, there was no disaffection. In her voice, the irony was less a vibration, and more an inlay, smooth cold ivory in wood. “Come in,” she said. “I’ll make tea.”

Muneyoshi had never been inside Anjou’s house, but even the kitchen reminded him of Kamiyama. His own home. Round marble-topped table, oak cabinets, brightly-lidded containers stacked beside the basin. A pale green teapot, cups, steam curling.

“So,” she said, seating herself down next to Sho, and directly opposite Muneyoshi. The sun lit on her face, shadows of the floral patterns on her curtains like moving tattoos onto her skin. “First.” And she laughed. “How did you two find me?”

Sho was staring down at his cup. Even though he was sitting next to Anjou, the table was curved so that he was out of the direct path of the window. In the flat light of the kitchen itself, he looked dark. Cold.

Mune spoke instead. “We had a kouhai called Oreki Hotaro. He’s a detective.”

They talked for over two hours. The sun set, and the tattoos on Anjou’s face disappeared. They filled her in on their mutual friends, on all the things that had happened after she transferred. She’d heard some of it from Yuasa. When Mune, remembering that she’d been good friends with Kouchi in the Manga Society too, asked her if they were still in touch, she got a strange look on her face. For some reason, it made Mune think of a crack in ice, the black water between broken halves.

Anjou bowed her head, looked at her half-empty cup of tea. Then smiled at him. “Kouchi was never really into online chatting and stuff. I wasn’t either. So. Shoko,” her voice changed then, alighting on a different topic. “Was the reason why I even had any Kamiyama contacts left, you know. She was so persistent.”

The question that had been at the back of Mune’s head ever since he’d found out about it, it was getting harder to ignore. “Anjou,” he said. “That e-mail from Yuasa. When she asked you if you were coming back for the holidays. Why didn’t you answer it?”

Sho reached for the teapot. Poured them all more tea. Mune glanced up at his face. Except for a hardness in the mouth, it was carefully neutral. Their backpacks were on the floor next to their chairs.

“The e-mail?” Anjou repeated. Her eyebrows knitted together. Then flew apart. Her face opened. “Oh, I see.” She was laughing again. He could see her teeth. Had Anjou used to laugh like this? So often, so largely. If he had never seen her again, would he have remembered her laugh as it used to be, and never realised how weighed down it was in comparison?

Of course he would have. That was exactly how he’d remembered it. To him, Anjou’s reticence had been normal.

“I see,” she said. “That’s…ironic. I never got it, you see. I thought Shoko simply hadn’t replied. That’s so, really, it’s so ironic.”

“Why?”

She leaned back, tilted her head up at the ceiling. It was separated into large, white blocks. Just like at home. When Muneyoshi was bored, he used to count the ones in his room instead of studying. “Because that was why I left. Not why, really, but more like the last straw. As Oreki-kun guessed, I wasn’t happy in Australia. And home.”

Her mouth twisted. “Well, home’s home. So I thought, why not just find a small village somewhere? Settle down. It’s not like I had anything to come back to, particularly.”

The tea Sho’d poured into his cup had made the ceramic warm between his fingers again. Almost uncomfortably so. He moved his hands further away. Anjou’s eyes, which were deeper set into her face than he’d remembered, were kind. “It’s not a bad thing, Kugayama. I wasn’t sad or anything. But there wasn’t anything I particularly regretted. It was just time to move on. And anyway, I’m happy here.”

She waved her left hand at them, the ring a dull gold on the fourth finger. “Like I told you, I found a good job, and I found love.” Another laugh. “I’ll let you decide which one was more important.”

It was so quiet. No cars, no people, no Final Fantasy.

Into the quiet, Sho finally spoke. “We actually have something to show you, Anjou.”

“Really, Mr Mangaka?” She seemed to find this funny. Muneyoshi wasn’t sure why. But Anjou’s sense of humour had always been a little strange. Translating her humour in A Corpse By Evening had been hands down one of the most difficult parts.

He hadn’t even tried, with Kudryavka’s Order. He looked at the still green liquid in his cup. The shame was a cold, curling feeling in his gut. Would Anjou be angry, when she read his manuscript?

“Kudryavka’s Order,” Sho was saying. “We decided to have a competition to see who drew it better. For fun.” His voice rang false. “And we thought it would be fun,” Again. “If you judged. Since you’re the author.”

Anjou glanced between the two of them. Muneyoshi remembered just who had gotten in the middle of them, the first few times Sho got angry at him in those last days of first year. She sounded cautious, but the excitement was stronger. “Really? That’s great! I wondered if Kugayama was going to draw it someday.”

He didn’t bother to protest.

Sho asked, “Do you want to see them?”

She clapped her hands together. “Of course!” Then, “But judging. I mean, I’m not a professional editor or anything…”

“That’s fine.” His best friend was already unzipping his backpack. “It’s just for fun anyway. Just tell us honestly which one you would want as the finished product.”

Her eyes flicked to Mune. “But,” she tried again. “You are a professional now, aren’t you, Tanabe? It’s not really…”

“Like I said.” Sho’s voice was as flat as the flourescent glare on his hair. “It’s for fun. Don’t worry about it.”

Mune unzipped his backpack too. He hadn’t had time to pack his manuscript away neatly that morning. The edges of the pages were a little bent. Just looking at the blank cover with just the title scrawled onto it, made him want to cringe. But. It wasn’t all bad. It’d given him that feeling. And looking at it when he was done, he’d known that no, it wasn’t all bad. Still, maybe it would be better if – he stuck his hands out, over the table to Anjou. “Please read mine first.”

They stared at him. Then at the manuscript.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s shorter than it should be. And I was rushing it, so. Just. Please. Read mine first.”

Then maybe Anjou would be happy enough with Sho’s script that she wouldn’t kill him. He remembered how scary she could get, when she thought he wasn’t depicting the characters or the scenes the way she’d wrote them to be.

She took it. The pages bent in her hands. She shifted her grip. “Okay. Come on, Sho, you’ll have to move closer. You too, Mune. Don’t you want to read it with us?”

He didn’t think he could stand just watching their expressions from over here. He got up. “I’ll just look over your shoulders.”

Sho scooted his chair over. Anjou laid the manuscript between them. Between their heads, Mune resisted the urge to shut his eyes as Anjou turned over the cover, put it down on Sho’s side of the table.

The art was poor. The lines too simple. The character designs flawed. Mune had always been worse at drawing people in left profile than right. Too many times, out of a half-conscious need for speed, he’d drawn them facing left.

But the feeling he’d been going for. It was there. A single footstep. An echo of silence. It was there.

He didn’t know what they were thinking. They were both so quiet, and from here, he couldn’t see their faces. But even if it didn’t give him the same satisfaction as A Corpse By Evening, he still felt pleased. A cool, broad feeling inside him. He felt as even if it wasn’t that good, he’d accomplished something.

Something that existed outside of himself.

The last page. Mune exhaled. He hadn’t realised he’d been holding his breath. He opened his mouth to ask them, well?

Sho’s chair scraped on the tiled floor. His best friend took his coat off the back of it, walked out of the kitchen. Mune’s question was still on the tip of his tongue. He couldn’t change it fast enough to call him back.

And Anjou sucked in a breath. It was wet. He snapped his gaze down to her, watched as she wiped at her face with the back of her hand. “The two of you,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “You haven’t changed at all.”

He had no words left. The question was gone, but there was nothing to say.

Anjou turned over the last page, laid it on top of the others. The back was blank. Just a sheet of white paper. She looked at him. “This isn’t Kudryavka’s Order. It’s not really my story, not anymore.”

Her hair was short now. When she tipped her head, smiled, the edges brushed her shoulder. “It’s better. It’s amazing. I don’t know if I should thank you or hit you, when you’ve just used my story like…like scrap paper. But I’m pretty sure,” and her mouth twisted. That old irony. A certain ruefulness. “Neither does Tanabe.”

Muneyoshi took a step to the archway. The corridor beyond. He reached for his coat.

“There isn’t anything you can say that will change things,” she said. “You know that, right? Sometimes, nothing can.”

He knew that. He knew.

He bowed his head. “I’ll be back. Sorry about this.”

They’d left Tokyo at ten in the morning. Reached Iwate in four hours. Taken another hour to rent a car and get lost and not lost and lost again on the road to Kunohe. Talked to Anjou for two. It was now five in the evening in December. The sun had set a while ago. When Muneyoshi stepped outside, into a garden lined with empty pots and empty flowerboxes, walked to a low iron-wrought gate and pulled it open with a gloved hand, everything was dark.

Above him, clouds were gathering. He couldn’t see the stars.

 

There were no stars in Tokyo. It was the only thing that had discomfited him enough about moving here that he’d actively disliked it. Satoshi had teased him about it, asking if the smoky darkness scared him, made him feel all alone. Satoshi’s mockery could be like that sometimes. Uncanny.

Hotaro ducked back into his room, pulled his window shut and pushed the handle back into place, locking it. One of the members of the Crafts Club had told him that the Geminids meteor shower would be reaching its peak in the next few days. Hotaro, Chitanda, Ibara and Satoshi had gone to watch the shower together at the Togaito property, which was one of the highest points of the village. The Togaito Geminids meteor shower party was an annual event. If not for Chitanda, he would’ve just stayed home, watched a samurai drama that was showing at the time.

Despite the waste of energy, he’d gone back the year after. And the year after that. It irked him in a vague way that he was going to miss it again this year.

If he’d gone with Satoshi to visit Ibara, probably they would have been able to watch it. As far as he could recall, Akita International University’s campus was in the countryside. But Satoshi had wanted to go alone.

He dropped onto his bed, laid down and looked up at the ceiling. Satoshi had told him after he broke the chocolates, on that bridge when the snow was falling, that Ibara was a good person, unlike any other. That he was over the moon that she could like him. He’d said the same thing about Hotaro too, standing next to the water with the city lights just across.

What did Satoshi want to ask Ibara?

If Hotaro concentrated, he could compose a theory.

He turned, pressing his face into his blanket. He didn’t want to.

When the knock came, he was almost asleep.

“Hotaro.” His best friend stood in the corridor in his winter coat and boots, overnight bag slung over his shoulder. “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”

He blinked at him, slowly. Then looked at his watch.

“I came back early. Well,” he smiled. “More like I came back late. I know it’s past midnight, but could you come with me? I want to get something warm to drink.”

Hotaro scratched a hand through his hair. “Where?”

“Just the dispenser. You should put on your coat though. It’s cold out.”

The drinks dispenser was out on the porch, the space in front of their dorm with a little roof on top, held up by four pillars. There was a rail for bikes there too. Someone had knocked one bike over by accident, caused a chain reaction of toppled steel dominoes. Satoshi toed the tyre of the nearest one, said, “Needs air.”

Hotaro didn’t have coins, so his best friend bought them both hot red bean soup.

“Too late for coffee or tea, right?”

Hotaro pried open the tab on the can. Took a gulp. Let the warmth settle inside him. He didn’t look at Satoshi when he spoke. “So? What?”

“What,” Satoshi repeated. “What, what?”

He pushed off his irritation. Hunched into his coat. He should have put on a sweater. It was too cold.

 

His friend leaned his shoulder against the dispenser. The glow of the dispenser’s light fell into his eyes. Made it difficult to make out his expression.

“Isn’t there something you should ask me?”

And Satoshi said he was the cryptic one.

“The competition. I called it off. That counts as a forfeit, you know.”

Ah. Hotaro turned, pressed his back to the dispenser. The porch lights didn’t extend far. Beyond, the campus, the sky was smoky dark. It was better than looking at his best friend. “We both forfeited.”

Satoshi huffed. Cheerful. “Hotaro the great detective admits defeat?”

The red bean can was warm against his skin. The moisture beaded off it, slipped onto his skin and tracked down the back of his hand. His shoulders tensed. And even though his words were quiet, he felt like he was shouting. “There is no proof, Satoshi. I can’t prove that I will always like you.”

His friend blinked at him. As he smiled, the expression on his face, blurred by the glow, became clear to Hotaro. The way Satoshi looked at him reminded him of broken chocolate, bridges at night, snow falling. A phone ringing, and a manuscript powdered with sodium. A note tacked on to a noticeboard in handwriting Chitanda didn’t yet recognise. “So that was the real question, huh? Couldn’t have put it better myself. As expected, Hotaro. As expected.”

Satoshi still hadn’t opened his own can. Was just holding it to his chest, his arm close to his body as if he were protecting himself. “I was angry,” he said. “People get angry for two reasons. Do you know them?”

His friend held up one finger. “A wrong has been committed.”

Another finger. “A right can’t be made.”

Satoshi looked down at his own fingers. “Essentially, things that they have no power to change. That’s why people get angry.”

There was a connection here. But he didn’t have enough data. He was too much in the dark. Alone. And then his best friend glanced up again, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. No evil glint in his eyes. Just the kind of resigned certainty with which he’d lost back then, the last time they played in that arcade together.

“I was angry,” Satoshi said. “Because I’m the wrong person for you to like. Chii-chan’s who you should like. She didn’t change you, per se. But she opened the door. She can keep opening doors for you. Me, I’m stuck. Database.”

The can was no longer so warm anymore. Growing cooler, to match the temperature of Hotaro’s hand. “I’m the same person I always was. If I don’t have to do it, I won’t. If I have to, then I’ll…”

“Do it quickly.” The ghost of fondness. “Your perception of yourself is the same, Hotaro. Not you. But that’s okay. Even the great detective has to have a weakness.”

A waved hand. “Don’t get mad now! I haven’t finished.”

The red bean soup was making itself down to his toes now. The air was still sharp against his face. Satoshi’s voice wasn’t sharp. It was clinical.

“I was angry because I couldn’t make it right either. I can’t become the right person for you. What’s wrong with me, is something I don’t want to fix. I don’t want to care about winning again. I don’t want to be disappointed. I don’t want to be tired. That won’t change just because you like me, and I like you too. Some things,” he exhaled. His eyes crinkled at the edges, the closest to a smile he’d gotten since he started telling Hotaro this. Since he’d handed over his data. “Are just doomed from the start.”

What Hotaro did with data was disassemble it. Put it together into something that made sense. With his best friend, this did not always work, because there was a method to Satoshi’s mind that Hotaro couldn’t quite grasp. It was simpler this time. “You like me,” he said. “Too.”

A nod. “That’s your answer. I like you too.”

Satoshi’s hand came away from his chest, dropped to his side. There was nothing between them but a foot of space, the glow of the dispenser casting a shadow at their feet. “Hotaro,” he said. “Now that you know all the information, and what I think about it, here’s my question. Will you still go on a date with me?”

Hotaro had never kissed anyone before. When he reached across the grey gap between them, put a hand on the side of Satoshi’s face and leaned in to press their mouths together, he had no idea what he was doing.

The world didn’t explode into rose, not like he’d sometimes had nighmares would happen with Chitanda. And his best friend smelled like a day’s bus and train travel, tired leather and recycled air. But it felt right.

It felt like it was the answer he’d been looking for.

 

They said goodbye to each other in Tokyo. Muneyoshi helped Sho take apart his boxes, stack them in the closet with his other stuff. Lay out his manga and tools. Slide A Corpse By Evening into where he hoped Sho would forget about it; an obscure place on the very top shelf. He hadn’t understood why Sho had brought it, but it didn’t make him any less warm.

He didn’t remember what time it was when they finished the cake, and he had to leave. Orientation was the next day, and he wasn’t nervous exactly. Just. He was the only person from Kamiyama going to Toudai this year. He wouldn’t know anyone there. He didn’t really want to leave. Walk on his own in this loud, alien city.

He had to.

“Thanks for helping me out earlier,” he said to Sho. Who smiled. Repeated it back at him. The politeness made him laugh. They promised to visit each other.

It hadn’t occurred to Muneyoshi until much later, after they’d already fallen out of touch. How hard it’d been to say goodbye. How, slowly, unnoticeably, it’d become easier and easier. Until one day, he and Takeshi were sitting in a secluded part of the park, the autumn leaves a wash of rot around them, and his friend was ranting, saying, “I don’t even know why I agreed to go out with her, she’s such a…”

“Well,” he’d said. Not really wanting to listen to one friend badmouth another. “There are plenty of fish in the sea. You know.”

It wasn’t the best thing to say. But then, Muneyoshi had never had good bedside manner. That was more Sho’s area.

But Takeshi hadn’t gotten angry at him. Not that he’d expected him to. After all, for Takeshi ranting was talking rapidly in a low, intense voice. A machine gun mutter, anger released in rapidfire, methodical rounds. What he had gotten was a contemplative look on his face. What he said was, “Like you.”

Muneyoshi had been slouching next to him on the park bench, hand in his pockets. He sat up now. “Takeshi.”

“Sorry,” his friend said. “Sorry, I know we said we’d just forget it.”

And then Takeshi had kissed him. His lips had been warm, dry. His hands were on either side of Muneyoshi’s face. Cold. It wasn’t the weather for gloves. Not yet. The smell of his cologne, the coffee he’d drunk earlier, was overwhelming.

Takeshi had kissed him, Muneyoshi had kissed back, fingers tangling in his friend’s curls and tongue slipping into his mouth, Kaede had seen them, and when Muneyoshi went to see her and she slammed the door in his face, her words still ringing in her ears, he’d gone back to the apartment he now shared with Konno, closed his bedroom door, sat on his bed, looked at his phone, and realised: when was the last time he and Sho had said goodbye?

There were no cars here. No trains. No people. Just rows of houses, each lit inside. The too-loud blare of someone’s TV when he walked past. And snow of course. Snow and the daylight buried inside it, making everything brighter. He called Sho. No one picked up. He called again. This time, he did.

“Idiot. I’m just here.”

And there he was. Half-sitting, half-leaning on a garden fence. One hand raised, the other thumbing to end the call. Muneyoshi came to a stop in front of him. He couldn’t read his own voice. The emotion in it. “Why did you leave like that, Sho?"

His best friend tucked his hands into his pockets. He wasn’t wearing gloves. They were probably on Anjou’s table with both their manuscripts. “You never told me why you called me that. Sho. To fly. Who does that? Just gives names to people."

Muneyoshi refused to react.

Eventually, Sho said, "It was obvious. Who won."

“We didn’t read yours.”

“Mune.” Why did he sound so calm, when he was the one who’d run out. Who’d just taken his coat and left? “I have read my own manuscript. I know. You won.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t Kudryavka’s Order. Anjou said so. I changed it too much. I didn’t have enough time.” His voice was taut, a string about to snap. “So I had to shorten the story, take just what I needed. The competition was about who would do Kudryavka’s Order more justice. So you won, Sho.”

“No.” His friend was shaking his head too. Looked up at him. His face wasn’t cold. The way it’d been when they started this in the first place, the way it’d been on the street. The way Sho had looked at him at school sometimes. It wasn’t cold, but Muneyoshi felt alone. “That’s what we agreed it was about, Mune. But the truth is I just wanted to beat you. And that had you written all over it.”

He’d left his own gloves on the kitchen table too. He put his hands in his pockets. “What does that mean?”

His friend looked down again. With Sho’s stuck out before him, bearing some of his weight, and Muneyoshi standing in front of him, their boots were almost touching. The leather dotted white.

It was snowing.

“Sho,” he said. “What does that mean?”

A snort. A turned head, gazing out into the slow, silent shower. They’d walked in snow like this countless times. They’d caught it in gloved hands, closed their fists and let the white ice melt to damp nothing.

“What do you mean, what does it mean?” There was a note of anger in his friend’s tone. A vibration, like the irony that used the vibrate in Anjou’s.

This vibration, Muneyoshi had always noticed. It made him angry too. Made his voice rise, pace by pace, note by note. “What I drew. I just drew it. It had nothing about me in it. It wasn’t about,” and at the very crescendo, he cracked. “Me.”

Sho’s breath hissed out between his teeth. “I hate it when you say that. Manga doesn’t draw itself, idiot. It might not be about you, Mune, the story might not be, but it is about you. It is you.”

His heart beat in his ears. His skin was flushed. He was scared. He was so tired of being scared. He’d just wanted to do something outside of himself.

He really was an idiot, wasn’t he?

“So, what?” he asked. “What now?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

Because he didn’t know. Because over the past three years, the two of them had been slowly, surely, disassembling their friendship, all the mechanisms they’d built to keep it functioning, keep it together. They only had the pieces left.

“It was amazing,” Sho said. Looking at him again. Looking him straight in the eye. “Rough, like you said. The art suffered in places because you were going too fast, and your lines were sloppy. And the characters, sometimes they just looked awkward. But. It was amazing. The best thing you’ve ever done. I can’t help but hate that.”

His voice was even. “You hate me.”

He didn’t expect his best friend to laugh. The sound was wrong, in this darkness, this snow, this little dark space. “I don’t hate you, Mune. I can’t hate you. I just hate what you do. And,” a long breath. “I love it too. Because it’s you. Because,” another long breath. “I love you.”

Snow was falling, piling on top of them like they were snowmen on a lawn. With just his coat on over his sweater, no scarf and no gloves, he was freezing. He hadn’t meant to stay out this long. He hadn’t been thinking at all.

“Sorry,” Sho said. “I guess it’s a bad time to bring it up.”

And Muneyoshi kissed him. Put his hands on either side of his face and kissed him. His lips were cold, chapped. His body, tense with shock. And then there was a hand over his hand, a warm sigh curling into his mouth, and he hadn’t wanted this, it was too complicated, too messy and he’d been afraid, afraid of what he could already lose, but that was okay, for now. That was fine. Because for the first time in a long time, he felt whole.

**Author's Note:**

> Please do review! Even a line about what you enjoyed in the story would mean a lot to me.


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